MML

god, do i have to? the B-boy bohemian icon. bronx native by way of jupiter. sagittarian like hendrix and spielberg, bruce lee and mos def. also, expatriate to paris and author of Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises and There's a Riot Goin' On .
or, in the alternative:
Miles Marshall Lewis is a recognized pop culture critic, essayist, literary editor, fiction writer, and music journalist, with a B.A. degree in sociology from Morehouse College. He is the author of the essay collection Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises, concerning coming of age in the Bronx under the aegis of hip-hop culture at its genesis. He is also the series editor and founder of Bronx Biannual, an urbane urban literary journal of fiction and essays, and author of There’s a Riot Goin’ On, a book on the making of the seminal 1971 Sly and the Family Stone album of the same name.
During the past twelve years, he has written for The Nation, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, The Believer, Spin, L.A. Weekly, Essence, Dazed and Confused, and many other publications. He served as the music editor of Vibe, deputy editor of XXL, literary editor of Russell Simmons’s Oneworld, deputy editor of BET.com, and a contributing writer for The Source during the 1990s. His interview with the late Pulitzer-winning playwright August Wilson is anthologized in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers alongside Joan Didion, Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers, and his fiction has been published in Bronx Noir, Wanderlust, Brown Sugar 3: When Opposites Attract, Oneworld, Rap Pages, and Uptown.

Bronx Biannual

Bronx Biannual is the most important literary journal in hiphop America. Consider Bronx Biannual an urban Paris Review, or McSweeney's Quarterly Concern from a hiphop standpoint. The journal publishes new writing--fiction, essays, reportage, interviews, poems--twice a year. The intention is to publish both celebrated and unsung writers on a variety of subjects germane to the black aesthetic. Urbane urban literature: bourgeois yet boulevard. Bronx Biannual will be fluid like water. No guiding manifesto per se, no set format. Issues might be published as graphic novels, or with two sheets of metal bound like a spiral notebook and shrink-wrapped in a Mylar sleeve, or with a concept in mind of what the Factory might've come up with had Andy Warhol put out a literary journal. Like XXL magazine edited by Rhodes Scholars at Oxford or Vanity Fair edited in the South Bronx at the Point. The sophomore issue includes new short stories by Sheree Renée Thomas, Sun Singleton, and Michael A. Gonzales; an account of white usurpation of Zora Neale Hurston's legacy by Liza Jessie Peterson; a poetic essay on racism by Uptown editor SékouWrites; and Def Poetry on Broadway poet Staceyann Chin on the tragedy of New Orleans.

There's a Riot Goin' On

With brisk wit and wiry analysis, Miles Marshall Lewis examines the recording process and spirit of the times surrounding the landmark Sly & the Family Stone album, There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Recorded during 1971 in a gothic Los Angeles mansion amid drugs, sex, violence, and the inspiring camaraderie of musicians like Miles Davis, Billy Preston, Ike Turner, Herbie Hancock, and Bobby Womack, There’s a Riot Goin’ On is at once the height and dark depth of the first black rock group and the haunted genius at its center, Sly Stone.

Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises

Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises is a confessional, stylistic account of coming of age in the Bronx alongside the birth and evolution of hiphop culture. This essay collection presents a journalistic mosaic of seminal figures in hiphop, documentary essays exploring the social decay of hiphop, and a substantial element of memoir, as well as observations on the generational issues of urban America. Scars captures the political ambitions of Russell Simmons, the Black Spades gang foundation of Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation, the spiritual sensibility of KRS-One and the Temple of Hiphop, and a keynoted debate on the materialistic, violent direction of hiphop culture. Interpreting the mood and inner-city atmosphere that caused the counterculture of hiphop, Bronx native Miles Marshall Lewis details the circumstances of his father's heroin addiction, his mother's Southern spirituality, his grandfather's career as a Harlem numbers runner, and his own journey from a tenement-building upbringing to worldwide travels—with hiphop trailing his steps. An incisive look at contemporary urban American life, Scars exposes the motivations and aspirations of a culture whose spiritual center was the Bronx.