Anyabwile 1

Anyabwile Love

Writer. Director. Professor.

Bio

Philadelphia native, Anyabwile Love, is a writer, filmmaker and Black Studies professor. He received his Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Temple University, May 2014. He has received several funding awards for his writing and filmmaking projects. He most recently completed the narrative short, The Spaces In Between. His current projects include the commissioned stage play, Dear Listener, and an adapted narrative short, The Invited.

Anyabwile is the founder and creator of The John Coltrane Symposium and former owner of Bailey Street Books. He currently serves on the Editorial Board of Siyabonana: The Journal of Africana Studies and as Associate Editor for the literary journal A Gathering Together. He is a tenured Professor of History and Black Studies at Community College of Philadelphia.

Artist Statement

My practice is memory work. They are collections of African narratives across time and space that utilizes written and visual language to engage the ordinary and mundane; sacred and profane. It is rooted in the worlds of Black folk as ordinary human beings. My work is “Country Markers.” They create worlds that magnify the cultural continuity of Africans in the diaspora. It is genealogy work. It grounds itself in the Black Radical tradition of truth telling. My work is liberatory. It pushes back against Western normative practices: its troupes and its literary and artistic canon. My work is celebratory of the vastness of the lived experiences of Africans across the diaspora. It reaches forward, toward a future where Black people still exist.