Many moons ago, as my Chickasaw ancestors would say, when I first began teaching at Wayne State University in Detroit, one of the best students I had was Nubia Kai. That wasn’t her name then, but you could tell it wouldn’t be long before the name caught up with her emerging cultural, political, and spiritual consciousness.
Those attributes have flowered along with her academic accomplishments, including a B.A. degree in anthropology and Black Studies from W.S.U., a M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in African Languages and Literature, and a Ph.D. in African Literature and Film from Howard University.
Nubia has amassed a number of awards and grants for her poetry, plays, and novels.
On Dec. 13 at Sister’s Uptown Bookstore, she will share some of these insights and read from her latest book “I Spread My Wings and I Fly,” a historical novel set in the mid-1850s southern Louisiana.
The novel, she notes, focuses on the maroons (enslaved Africans who ran away, armed themselves, and lived free independent lives on the fringes of slavery) in the United States, the psychological effects of slavery, and the dynamics of Black culture, folklore, and philosophy. A narrative of epic proportions, the novel is invested with much of the research Nubia has assembled over the years, and then spun creatively, capturing many of the aspects consistent with maroon guerilla warfare and the quest for emancipation.
Join Nubia and many of her friends and associates on Friday, Dec. 15 at Sister’s Uptown Bookstore, 1942 Amsterdam Ave. in Harlem, from 6 to 8 p.m.