GABRILLA BALLARD
GABRILLA BALLARD
Author of the forthcoming "Mama's Block, Mama's Blood"
GaBrilla Tara Ballard is daughter of a nurse/super woman/ singer and law enforcer. She is grand-daughter of a Music Composer and a Preacher. New Orleans Native. Writer. Healer Songwriter. Singer. Teacher. Poet. Musician. Painter. When home, a second liner :-) and at times hermit. Political Thinker and Freedom fighter who uses all mediums to bring about enlightenment, truth and to expose those things that she finds other artists and authors skating around or speaking on lightly. Says Gabrilla about Red Dirt Publishing:
"I feel my work should be of interest to RDP because my voice is one of many powerful literary/artistic voices born and bred in New Orleans that brings to writing a sense of New Orleans culture that is often appropriated and objectified by those who are not only disconnected from the culture, but have no real understanding of its origins. I write for black people and about black people and our many dimensions. I celebrate that which is unique to our experience, i.e. spirit: church/religion/ Gawd, music, language (yah, we got our own thing…), rhythm, colors, all those things that make us who we are: Tight. I am 25 years old, so I am coming from a perspective that isn’t often heard in the black literary orologi world. But is so needed. The Title of my Novel is "Mama’s Block, Mama’s Blood". I wish to illuminate the truths about a family of women in New Orleans who are all powerful, yet fail to recognize it and use it to transform their worlds. "Mama’s Block, Mama’s Blood, is a story about a young woman, Lanelle, who travels back home to discover her own power and change the entire fate of a family too proud to walk away from something long gone and too afraid to embrace something that is redemptive."
HANIFAH WALIDAH
HANIFAH WALIDAH
Playwright of "Black Folks Guide to Black Folks" and author of the forthcoming "Book of Invincible"
Originally from NYC, is a social performance artist/activist now living in Oakland California. First introduced as Sha-Key with her 1994 Hip Hop LP "A Headnadda's Journey to Adidi-Skizm"; she has since received the NYFA Fellow in Poetry in 1999 and in that same year co-wrote and performed in the multi-cast stage play and musical "Bloom" (Ain't I a flower); which had successful runs at WOW and the Nuyorican Poets Café. The debut of Hanifah Walidah's one-woman multi-character stage play "Black Folks Guide to Black Folks" which debuted at the Oakland Box Theater in October 2002 and later at the Alice Arts Theater in April 2003, received outstanding reviews from both the SF Chronicle ("comic tour de force") and the Bay Guardian ("A gap tooth Zora Neale Hurston). It can now be found on DVD.
Her Red Dirt release will be a double volume book featuring both her play Black Folks Guide to Black Folks and The Book of Invincible which continues where the play left off, from the perspective of one of its more endearing characters, Ms. Invincible.