Poetry empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

Whether we consider hip-hop as an evolved manifestation of the Harlem Renaissance or something completely new under the sun, it clearly has moved beyond the stage of just entertaining lives to that of informing and empowering lives.

We are drawn to the Renaissance because of the hope for black uplift and interracial empathy that it embodied and because there is a certain element of romanticism associated with the era’s creativity, its seemingly larger than life heroes and heroines, and its most brilliantly lit terrain, Harlem, USA.