Kamaria Muntu

Kamaria Muntu born November 1, 1962, is a poet, writer and activist. She was born in Baltimore, Maryland the daughter of an elementary school teacher, who later became a curriculum specialist, and a bus driver who was among the first Black men to integrate the Baltimore Transit Company. When she was a month old, her parents divorced and she and her mother lived with her grandparents. Her mother later remarried and she had a turbulent upbringing, but it was her grandmother's steadfast commitment to community that profoundly influenced her sense of social justice. While attending Milford Mill Senior High school now Milford Mill Academy in Baltimore, she notes humorously that she played Mrs. Chumley in a production of Harvey, the wife to Dr. Chumley played by the now celebrity Ira Glass, of "This American Life". She is a single mother, with a son and a daughter born in 1983 and 1985 respectively. Muntu has organized extensively in Baltimore, North Carolina, Savannah - and Atlanta, Georgia where "she grew her political and feminist wings" around issues ranging from gender equality to the death penalty. Muntu has read her poetry at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta with such notables as Sonia Sanchez and Mari Evans. She was diagnosed with Lymphoma Cancer in 1994 and considers herself a survivor. In 1996, after hearing her read her poetry, author and American Book Award winner Dr. Joyce Ann Joyce suggested her for inclusion in the prestigious anthology . One of the featured poems "Of Women and Spirit" is an homage to African-American film-maker Julie Dash's "Daughters of the Dust". The editors hailed Muntu as a "rising star in neo-aesthetic literary circles". Spurred by her dedication to women's equality, she was one of the principal writers (among them Ajamu Baraka who won the United Nations Ambassador Kofi Annan award as a death penalty activism) of a paper entitled "A Call to End the Oppression of Women..." a position paper confronting the sexist undertones of the Million Man march published in Fertile Ground by Kalamu Ya Salaam and Keshia Brown (Renagade Press). Muntu has said that one of the highlights of her life was having New Years dinner with the famed historian Dr. John Henrik Clarke at the home of Larry "Obadele Williams". In 2007 Muntu relocated to London, United Kingdom where she created Touched magazine, a magazine for the International Black Woman.

References:

Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, Editors Patricia Liggins Hlll & Bernard W. Bell. Houghton Mifflin, 1997 (Critical Review).

Racial and Gender Attitudes as Predictors of Feminist Activism , http://jbp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/32/4/455 - Similar pages Walking Still, http://archive.lib.msu.edu/DMC/African%20Journals/pdfs/glendora%20supplement/issue2/grbs0021997010.pdf

Konch Magazine,www.ishmaelreedpub.com/articles/toure.html