Marc bamuthi joseph biography married

Born to Haitian immigrants in , a couple of years after the culture itself emerged in the Bronx, Joseph came of age as the Black neighborhoods of Queens became an important center of hip-hop activity. It was what all the cool kids listened to. As he grew up, hip-hop became something more. It seemed to suddenly encompass everything he learned, until it became the lens through which he saw the world.

Hip-hop also influenced his understanding of the word.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (born

The poetry was urgent and visceral, and provided for Joseph a catalytic moment. With the level of belligerence in rap music at the time, spoken word sort of birthed its counterpart. A multidisciplinary prodigy, Joseph worked with the Senegalese National Ballet by the age of 23, and captured the National Poetry Slam crown as part of the San Francisco team by The piece was an intensely personal set of poems delivered to his unborn son, reflecting on sex and love, race and generation, fatherhood and legacy in ways that were, by turns, humorous and haunting.

The two projects are, of course, interrelated. He has taught extensively through Youth Speaks , and is a well-published writer, and an in-demand lecturer at colleges, universities, and institutions around the world. Pushing the idea of performance as pedagogy is important, so that the work exists to provoke discourse about history and to use the idiom of hip-hop culture to push audiences emotionally and intellectually to another place.

I create work to create an educational environment, not necessarily to teach, but to nurture an environment in which learning or growth can take place. Perhaps this concern with environment befits an artist who is so aware of his own transits. Marc Bamuthi Joseph is always in motion, and is intimately conscious of his own journeys as metaphors for larger questions beyond himself.

That his art should be found so compelling to students and audiences in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe says much about the universality of hip-hop, and so much more about the vision of Marc Bamuthi Joseph.