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"Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention" (Encore presentation.)

On this edition of ST, which originally aired back in March, we speak with Jamal Joseph, whose new memoir is "Panther Baby: A Life of Rebellion and Reinvention." This engrossing autobiography --- a gritty yet hopeful hybrid of coming-of-age candor, street-savvy wisdom, and recent socio-political history --- follows Jospeph from his early years in the Bronx and Harlem, to incarceration stints in Riker's Island and then Leavenworth, to the Film School faculty of Columbia University. He's worked as a filmmaker, poet, community organizer, children's theater/arts director, and more --- but the pivotal time of Joseph's life, as we find in these pages, was his involvement with the militant Black Panther movement. Charged with conspiracy as one of the "Panther 21" in one of the defining American criminal cases of the 1960s, and then exonerated, Joseph became the leader of the Panthers’ New York chapter. His incredible story continues in this memoir --- and has been summarized by Kirkus Reviews --- like so: "Internecine power struggles, fueled by government infiltration and violence, broke the Panthers apart . . . and Joseph found himself going underground and finally to prison. He remained there for the next 20 years or so, a man-child coming of age behind bars. In prison, he discovered art and began to write poetry and plays, and he formed a theater group of prisoners who performed his plays about the life around them. Quickly becoming an established artist and drawn to academia, Joseph used these credentials to help found Harlem’s IMPACT Repertory Theatre, where thousands of young people experience music, drama, dance, and film. . . . Readers will draw inspiration from his story of struggle and transformation."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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