A few years ago I had the honor/pleasure of attending a summer seminar on hiphop culture and its pedagogical connections at NYU. That seminar was the first time UVM had participated in the Faculty Resource Network. It was an eyeopening if not eye popping experience for me. We dug simultaneously into the real live roots of hiphop in nyc, met new practitioners, read arcane scholarship, talked, listened, danced. My world expanded exponentially as a result of that visit. My teacher, Kyla Gault, has since published the book she was finishing at the time – The Words Black Girls Play – a cultural/historical/musical perspective of kinectic oral traditions in black female culture. Kyra has since moved to the faculty of Baruch College in NYC. She is an academic, a poet, a performing artist, a living presence personifying what it is she wants to teach and bring to the world. She writes I consider myself an organic musical intellectual focusing on people, performance, pedagogy, entrepreneurship, and public advocacy. I see myself as accountable for the possibility of sustaining affordable living and performance spaces and transforming the economic well-being and marketability of musicians of African descent in the creative economy of New York City.What an amazing model she is for walking your talk. Check out her website and blog. Politics is indeed personal.

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