In 2024, Baldwin would have been one-hundred years old. His milestone birthday was celebrated all over the United States, and the world. In Paris, from September 9th to 13th, 2024, the James Baldwin Centennial Festival recognized his continued relevance by honoring his life and writing. The festival was organized by Tara Phillips, the eloquent and dedicated Executive Director of the Paris-based non-profit, La Maison Baldwin, which was established in 2016 to preserve James Baldwin’s memory and contributions to literature and political activism...

Roopa Chauhan

January 20, 2025

art, literature, activism - detroit city, central europe

Social theorists around the world acknowledge Detroit as a complex place that was once built as a “utopian vision of the future” and now exists as utopia’s perfect antithesis. The city’s time-line has followed the devolution of many cities depicted in science-fiction tales, giving rise to cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on a future of advanced technological and scientific accomplishments...

Ashley Cook

February 19, 2024

music, literature, culture - detroit city

Among the newest array of online zoom meetings and virtual dance parties, in the ether of the net, exists a 115 minute ambient music set weaved intermittently with a reading of Octavia E. Butler’s Speech Sounds. Composed by Perlex, Speech Sounds Live was presented as part of the BLDG:01 live streaming project called Stille. The airy vibe of the encouraging melody and layered sounds, like wind or a machine working slowly with a steady rhythm,...

Ashley Cook

May 25, 2020

music, literature, film - detroit city