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Askhari Johnson Hodari
Recently Askhari Johnson Hodari quit school, but she is not a dropout. After seven years as a professor of African American Studies, psychology and women’s studies, (and three years as a special education teacher), she stepped away from the classroom to become a full-time writer. She is the author of two books, Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs (Broadway Press, 2009) (www.lifelinesproverbs.com) and The African Book of Names (Health Communications, 2009) (www.afrikannames.com).
Hodari earned her undergraduate degree from Spelman College and her Ph.D. from Howard University. She writes about a variety of academic and popular culture subjects, such as: prosocial behavior, social action, prejudice, domestic violence, prison systems, chattel slavery, African martial arts and electoral politics. However, she specializes in U.S. Black History, Africana/Black Studies, Black women’s studies, and Black psychology. Her work is culturally specific in terms of theme and treatment, emphasizing freedom, equity, truth, desire, determination, courage, community, contradiction, justice, respect and release. One of her goals is to record the unfolding of humanity by focusing on people who have been neglected and dismissed- people of color, oppressed people, poor people, children and humble people. Socially conscious writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Marcus Garvey, Ida B. Wells, James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joseph Bruchac and Isabel Allende influence her.
A former journalist, Hodari has written and reported for the Afro-American newspapers in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD. Her work has appeared in Essence, Black Issues Book Reviews, Class, Catalyst, Rap Pages, and Urban Profile Magazines. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in In the Tradition, Testimony, The Ringing Ear, and Role Call. Hodari is the founder and moderator of de Griot Space, an online writing workshop for Afridiasporic writers.
Besides writing, Hodari overdoses on community organizing, sports, sunrises and other things aggressive. Recently, she has given up: looking for money under sofa cushions, and trying to save the world. Now, when she is not practicing the Four Agreements, she picks sunflowers, grows lemons, counts butterflies, watches 24, listens to Sweet Honey in the Rock, Nina Simone, Prince, Etta James, Aretha Franklin and plays Taboo, Canasta and Spades.
Hodari regularly studies and travels the African diaspora. Her family is from Marion, South Carolina, and she was raised in Montgomery County, Maryland. She now lives in the “magic city” of Birmingham, Alabama- a home of the successful struggle for civil and human rights.
Photo by Jessica Latten
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