at age four. He grew up in Paterson, New Jersey.
After graduating from Paterson Catholic Regional
High School, he received a B.A. degree in Latin
American/Iberian Studies from Columbia College,
Columbia University. He earned an M.F.A. degree
in fiction from Brooklyn College in 2004 and com-
pleted an M.B.A. in computer information sys-
tems and marketing at Zicklin School of Business
at Baruch College in New York in 2005. Also an
avid student of anthropology, James is an interna-
tional traveler who has lived in Brazil, Spain, and
Mexico, where he studied Spanish and Portuguese
and learned about the distinctive and multifaceted
cultures in each of these geographical locations by
immersing himself in the daily lives of the people.
Over the past decade, James has emerged as an
important activist voice in the black gay and les-
bian movement. He currently serves as a Craig G.
Harris Fellow for the New York State Black Gay
Network’s Fluid Bodies project, addressing the
quality-of-life issues of New York City’s same-
sex-desiring Caribbean community. He was the
chairman and executive director of Other Coun-
tries: Black Gay Expression; the coprogrammer for
Bromfield Street Educational Foundation, with
responsibilities for the OutWrite 1999 national
lesbian and gay writers’ conference, and the de-
velopment officer for the Lesbian and Gay Com-
munity Service Center of New York City. James
was one of the organizers of the first Fire & Ink:
A Writers Festival for Black GLBT Writers, which
was held at the University of Illinois at Chicago in
September 2002.
James’s prose and essays have been published in
Think Again, Brooklyn Review, CALLALOO: A Journal
of African American and African Arts and Letters,
Fighting Words: Personal Essays by Black Gay Men,
The Mammoth Book of Gay Erotica, His 2: Brilliant
New Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent, and
Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction. James, who
is also a former coeditor of Kuumba, an African-
American gay and lesbian journal, has published
his poetry in Freedom in This Village: Twenty-five
Years of Black Gay Men’s Writing, Bloom: Queer Fic-
tion, Art, Poetry and More, The Nubian Gallery: A
Poetry Anthology, Black Ivy: A Literary and Visual
Arts Magazine, Role Call: A Generational Anthol-
ogy of Social and Political Black Art and Literature,
Milking Black Bull: 11 Gay Black Poets, and two
Lambda Literary Award–winning anthologies: So-
journer: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS, and
The Road before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets. Spirited,
Affirming the Soul of Black / Gay Lesbian Identity,
which he edited with Lisa C. Moore, was published
by Red Bone Press in 2006.
The recipient of a 1997 fellowship from the Lil-
lay Colony for the Arts, James published his first
collection of poetry, Lyric: Poems along a Broken
Road in 1999. It was a finalist in the 1999 Lambda
Literary Awards competition for poetry. James’s
activist commitment is often heard in his speaker’s
voice, as in “Uprising”:I want to start a campaign
One that gets homosexuals
To recall
What it means to be gay.James’s other projects include The Damaged
Good (2006), his second collection of poetry, which
was published in November 2006, and Shaming the
Devil, a collection of short fiction, which is sched-
uled to be published in 2007.BIBLIOGRAPHY
James, G. Winston. “Storm.” Callaloo 22, no. 4 (Fall
1999): 893–894.
Wilfred D. SamuelsJazz Toni Morrison (1992)
Jazz, the middle novel of TONI MORRISON’s tril-
ogy, which includes BELOVED (1987) and Paradise
(1998), weighs the human costs of the Great Mi-
gration of World War I on African Americans.
Set in 1920s Harlem with numerous flashbacks to
19th-century rural Virginia, Jazz brings together all
genres of African-American culture: black speech,
BLUES aesthetics, slave narrative elements, call and
response, multivocality, and jazz ensemble struc-
ture. In short, it is an entirely new kind of novel
with its refusal of the usual numbered chapter di-
visions, its blank pages, riffs, motifs, transitionalJazz 273