TOO Episode 216 - Book Club 01 | The Dutchman by Amiri Baraka | Featuring Taylor Barfield

In this episode, Adam and Budi kick of the first book club episode of the year with The Dutchman, by Amiri Baraka. We welcome Taylor Barfield to the discussion, as he joins Budi and Adam in dissecting this classic.

Poet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka was well known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Throughout most of his career his method in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays was confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature.

Baraka’s legacy as a major poet of the second half of the 20th century remains matched by his importance as a cultural and political leader. His influence on younger writers has been significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s Baraka did much to define and support black literature’s mission into the next century. His experimental fiction of the 1960s is considered some of the most significant African-American fiction since that of Jean Toomer.
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Taylor Barfield is a dramaturg, writer, and theater artist from Baltimore, MD. He served as the Acting Literary Manager at Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, CT and the Literary Manager at Two River Theater in Red Bank, NJ. Taylor currently works as a freelance dramaturg and consultant working with organizations such as the Guthrie, BMG, Portland Center Stage, the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, and Yale Repertory Theatre.

 Taylor received his B.A. in Molecular/Cellular Biology and English Literature from Johns Hopkins University and is a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, where he earned his M.F.A. and D.F.A. in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. His scholarly work explores how contemporary Black American playwrights re-imagine and re-stage Black theater history. His writing has been published in Vulture, TDF Stages, and the Marginalia Review of Books. He is currently an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch.