Magazines that prominently featured the works of poets, visual artists, historians, sociologists, dramatists, and fiction writers were a principle mainstay of the original Harlem Renaissance. Those famous writers and thinkers of the movement whose names today for many are commonplace––i.e., poet Countee Cullen, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, artist Aaron Douglas––first gained widespread exposure in magazines like The Crisis , Opportunity , The Messenger , and The Negro World . In addition to providing contributors with prestige and bankable prize monies, these early twentieth century magazines also took and recorded frequent measures of the state of black culture. Many contemporary magazines in 2005 retain elements of the classic Harlem Renaissance periodicals but few embody the tradition so fully in spirit and substance as AFRICAN VOICES Magazine . Founded in 1992, African Voices entered the new century as a premier publisher of works by both emerging and established cultural worker

The media treated itself to a field day in 2001 when former President Bill Clinton announced that he had signed a 10-year lease, at $354,000 per year, for office space in Harlem on West 125th Street. The news brought much needed hope and inspiration to those who had witnessed the United States’ most famous neighborhood struggle to survive the ravages of decayed buildings, a decreased population, dwindling employment, and the same debilitating drug traffic that crippled communities all over the country. That Clinton’s ever-so-cool Harlem shuffle lent a major boost to the community’s profile and real estate business is not to be denied. However, few things could better symbolize the in-progress twenty-first century Harlem Renaissance than the restoration of a Harlem brownstone sponsored by ESSENCE Magazine and the Abyssinian Development Corporation (ADC). As part of its year-long 35th anniversary celebration, ESSENCE Magazine entered into a partnership with the Abyssinian Development C

(from Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black ) Through the glowing-bronze reeds of Harlem midnight and the plum-rose bloom of Spanish twilight African-griot-magus waters the garden of his neon spirals here in the valley of my jazz-consoled hunger and madness. 70 x 7,000 miles we travel the naked truth of hidden beginnings and guessed-at endings, African-griot-magus inhaling demons more easily than I exhale peace of mind or clarity of soul. African-griot-magus balancing divinity like tornadoes humming on the tips of three angels’ tongues. Inside my third mind I build a planet ruled by jasmine, violets, and the shadows of voices bubbling joy. With my seventh mind I hammer a chain of wonders that hold African-griot-magus to all of his promises. With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new. 80 x 8,000 years we sing the naked story of blue-boned Harlem midnight and plum-rose Spanish twilight. African-griot-magus h

Unless a person enjoys an association with someone who successfully integrated the Harlem Renaissance goals of artistic excellence, individual integrity, and spiritual vision into their creative agenda, it becomes easy to view the movement and its influence as a finite period restricted to a few decades. Such a perspective is less likely to hold, however, when meeting someone such as the Savannah-born and New York-raised artist Luther E. Vann. As an adolescent and young man in the 1950s and 1960s, Vann satisfied his hunger for creative expression with frequent visits to sources of knowledge and insight like the Art Students’ League, the Center for Art and Culture, and the Cinque Gallery, places where Harlem Renaissance artists had left their aesthetic marks and where some had established new roots. The Cinque Gallery in particular was not founded until 1969 by three major artists identified with the Harlem Renaissance: collagist Romare Bearden, figurative painter Ernest Crichlow, and a