Photo: Ngoma Hill | © Joyce Jones/ Suga Bowl Photography. Some Rights Reserved. Creative Commons CC-NC-BY-ND. Used with Permission.
Program note: we’re in a new weekly Tuesday night slot from 10-12 midnight! We’re also pre-empted on May 7 for WBAI’s Spring Fund Drive. After this show, we’ll be back on May 14.
The next show will air on Tuesday April 30, 2019 from 10:00 PM – 12 Midnight Eastern Standard Time on WBAI, 99.5 FM in the NYC metro area or streaming online at wbai.org. This broadcast features an interview with poet and multi instrumentalist (guitarist, electronic violinist, flutist and yidaki/”didgeridoo” player) and “artivist” Ngoma Hill.
Ngoma is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter, Artivist and paradigm shifter, who for over 45 years has used culture as a tool to raise socio-political and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought.
A former member of Amiri Baraka’s “The Spirit House Movers and Players” and the contemporary freedom song duo “Serious Bizness,” Ngoma weaves poetry and song that raises contradictions and searches for a solution to a just and peaceful world.
Ngoma has curated and hosted the poetry slam at the Martin Luther King Family Festival of Social and Environmental Justice at the Yale/Peabody Museum since 1995. He was also selected to participate in the 2009 Badilisha Poetry Xchange in Capetown, South Africa. In December of 2011, he was initiated as a Priest of Obatala in Ibadan,Nigeria. In June of 2013 he was initiated as a Priest of Ifa.
Ngoma was the Prop Slam Winner of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Competition in Middletown, CT and has been published in African Voices Magazine, Long Shot Anthology, The Underwood Review, Signifyin’ Harlem Review, Bum Rush the Page/Def Poetry Jam Anthology, Poems on the Road to Peace (Volumes 1, 2, and 3) and Let Loose On the World-Amiri Baraka at 75.
The Understanding Between Foxes and Light-Great Weather For Media and New Rain/Blind Beggar Press 35th Anniversary Issue. He was featured in the PBS spoken word documentary “The Apropoets” with Allen Ginsburg.
Ngoma was selected as the Beat Poet Laureate of New York for 2017 by The National Beat Poetry Foundation.
Ngoma has released seven recordings as a solo recording artist, which can be purchased via the CD Baby Music Store.
(Bio excerpted and adapted from his CD Baby site.)
This program is hosted, engineered, produced, and edited by Joyce Jones. Listen for our On the Bandstand segment with NYC metro area appearances of Suga’ guests at the end of the first hour with Associate Producer Hank Williams.
Ngoma Hill will be at the Skylight Gallery readings in Brooklyn’s Restoration Plaza on May 9 (and the second Thursday of every month), the Fat Tuesdays music and poetry showcase at Harlem’s Sister’s Uptown Bookstore on May 21 (and the third Tuesday of every month).
Web Extras:
Watch Ngoma perform “This Poem is Free.”
Hank Williams is assistant producer for Suga’ in My Bowl and produces the weekly “On the Bandstand” segment as well as running the show’s website and blog, where he has reviewed several jazz festivals. His writing has also appeared in Left Turn magazine and American Music Review. He teaches at Lehman College in the City University of New York system.
Suga' in My Bowl 
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