Powell‽, J. Otis (1955–2017)

James Otis Powell (a.k.a. J. Otis Powell‽) was an influential Minnesota-based American spoken word poet. He was the founding producer of the award-winning Write On Radio! show at KFAI-FM in Minneapolis, an advisor for the Minnesota Spoken Word Association, a curator for Intermedia Arts, and a program director for the Loft Literary Center. He was also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Loft Creative Nonfiction Award, Jerome Foundation mid-career-artists grants, a Jerome Foundation travel-and-study grant, the Intermedia Arts Interdisciplinary McKnight fellowship, and the 2017 Sally Award at the Ordway Theater. The MN Spoken Word Association awarded Powell‽ its Urban Griot Innovator Award and inducted him into the MN Spoken Word Association Hall of Fame in 2009.

J. Otis Powell‽ was born on November 25, 1955, in Huntsville, Alabama, to a single mother, nurse, and minister, Rev. Susan Slaughter. His maternal grandparents were Riley Slaughter Sr. and Sudellar Jackson Slaughter.

According to the preface to his chapbook, Pieces of Sky, Powell‽ grew up steeped in the oral gospel tradition. His maternal great grandmother, Caroline Jackson, was an illiterate formerly enslaved woman who managed to memorize enough Bible passages to correct Powell when he read to her. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Riley Slaughter Sr., was a gospel preacher, and his maternal grandmother was known regionally as a prayer warrior. His mother, Susan, was one of the few women ministers in the United Methodist Church in north Alabama.

According to his account of his early life in an interview with Rain Taxi, Powell‽ started acting in kindergarten and started writing in junior high school. He graduated as a telecommunications (television production) major with a minor in philosophy at Alabama A&M, a historically black college. After college, he moved around the country before coming to the Twin Cities in 1987 as a teaching volunteer. He later studied creative writing with Gloria Anzaldúa and performance poetry with Quincy Troupe and Alexs Pate. He also studied and performed with Amiri Baraka. A strong believer in self-authorship, Powell‽ had put an exclamation point behind his name for many years. Later, he changed that to an interrobang (‽), a combination of an exclamation point and a question mark.

A jazz musician and spoken word poet, Powell‽ appeared in and released several CDs and films, including a DVD titled News as Abstract Truth, Unsentimental with Rene Ford, This Cat Is Out (in association with The New Day Blues Band), Words Will Heal The Wound, Theology: Love & Revolution (1996), and Balm! (2012).

Powell‽’s first poetry collection, My Tongue Has No Bone (2001), featuring art by Janice Lee Porter, was published by Porter Publishing. His chapbook, Pieces of Sky (2014), was released by Rain Taxi. A collection of prose and quintets, Pieces of Sky offers a behind-the-scenes look at Powell‽’s novel-in-progress, Bottomless Sky. His final book, Waiting for a Spaceship, was published by SPOUT Press in June of 2017, a few months prior to his sudden death. Powell‽ was also a co-editor of Blues Vision, a poetry anthology published jointly by the Minnesota Humanities Center and Minnesota Historical Society Press in February 2015.

Powell‽ is known for his deep knowledge of African American aesthetics and his counter-cultural stance. His poetry is rooted in Afro-centric lore and culture, and informed by the oral tradition in literature and music, as well as the Black Arts Movement. Despite being a vocal proponent for cultural production that depicts the African American experience, Powell‽ also resisted being pigeonholed by the limits of “geography or race or class,” insisting on being “a citizen of the universe,” according to the same Rain Taxi interview. Highlighting the value of music and art production on the margins of mainstream culture, he calls for criticism to reflect and validate the experience and expression of Indigenous and minority populations.

Powell‽ died on Monday, August 28, 2017.