Rivera Masterpiece
On the seventy-seventh anniversary of his birth, I recall the stunning epic poem, Jazz in Jail, by Louis Reyes Rivera. Robin Kelley called it “one of this century’s great works of art.” In tribute, I post the foreword I wrote for the poem’s publication in 2016, four years after Rivera’s passing. Find the poem!! Steeped in discipline and touched by genius, Louis Reyes Rivera has given us an African-Amerindian lyrical and visionary epic, Jazz in Jail. He was, as he would term i