Influences

• Different poets and writers have influenced me in different ways at different times throughout my life. The poets of the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s Black Arts Movements were the ones who inspired and almost compelled me to begin writing poetry as a teenager, especially Langston Hughes, Henry Dumas/Eugene Redmond, and Amiri Baraka. Then in college it was Nikki Giovanni, Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda. Some years later when I was managing bookstores I came across the works of Jalaluddin Rumi and read everything I could find by him in English. And more recently, during the composition of The Bridge of Silver Wings, I didn’t feel so much influenced by the Prague poet Rainer Maria Rilke as I felt a kind of kinship with what he experienced while writing his Duino Elegies.

Favorite Books

• My favorite books are pretty easy to tell because I generally write reviews about them and post and publish the reviews on in various magazines and websites, including here at Red Room, usuually in the articles section but sometime in my regular blog. Probably the most extensive sample of my book reviews are on Amazon, where I am a "Vine" reviewer.

Favorite Authors

• I tend to be extremely passionate about different authors at different times in my life but long-time favorites and influential writers include those of the Harlem Renaissance, Surrealism, the Black Arts Movement, French Commitment (as in Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, the sometime-in sometimes-out Boris Vian), Ben Okri, a number of contemporary folks and quite a few lesser known types.

What I'm Reading

• After years of noticing references to James George Frazer's "The Golden Bough" I finally picked up an edition that seems to come as close to the 1890 original as any out there. It's about 900 pages that I will probably be reading for the rest of 2010. I also received as a gift a copy of the novel "Suite Francaise" by Irene Nemirovsky and am having a lot of fun discovering this author's brave and brilliant work.

  Took a hard look at Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer winner "Slavery by Another Name."

  ALSO: I recently posted reviews of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's SHADOW OF THE WIND; Andre Gide's THE IMMORALIST; Elizabeth Alexander's Body of Life; and Toni Morrison's What Moves at the Margin. Currently diving into Sister Souljah's second novel, MIDNIGHT, a biography of Yeats, a biography of Rilke, and dipping in and out of several others as well.

Web Links

• Aberjhani's Author Profile on Amazon
• Creative Thinkers International
• Part of My World at Amazon
• Meet Me on MySpace
• Aberjhani's Lens Factory at Squidoo
• With the Folks at the Ecademy
• My Book Stash at LibraryThing
• Notes on Publishing at StartUp Biz
• Aberjhani at AuthorsDen
• The Twitter Tribes Talked Me Into It
• Citizen Journalist Aberjhani at Examiner.com
• The Red Room Hall of Fame
• The River of Winged Dreams