Karen Wilson

ing, poetry making and risk-taking, reporting and cavorting, and telling the truth as she understands it to be. That being said...


Dr. Wilson-Ama’Echefu was a featured presenter at the 2010 Blues and the Spirit Symposium alongside legendary Hip Hop Artist Chuck D, and other notable music and history giants, and has spoken and presented on intellectual and cultural life in the African American Slave Quarter Community - or communities of captive Africans - on college campuses across the United States. Dr. K’s research interests include African cultural and intellectual history, eighteenth and nineteenth-century African captivity in the United States, leadership and strategy in communities of African captives, and the philosophies and theologies of Africans and their descendants in the Western Hemisphere as identified through their song, story, dance, and visual art. Her scholarship identifies African intellectual and cultural presence in North America as providing evidence for African continuity, discontinuity, transformation, and innovation over four hundred years. Her concept of a West African Diasporic Blues Complex represents a flexible collection of socio-cultural ideas like rhythmic complexity and truth-telling that connect a network of deep culture between African descendant communities in the Western Hemisphere. She writes on the style, substance, and resilience of intellectuality in African descended working-class communities of the United States, as well as the histori-cultural presence of African American women, which includes their beautiful blues. As a singer and storyteller, Dr. K bears the African diasporic culture she analyzes as an interdisciplinary scholar. As a Teaching Artist, she embraces both the engaging style and intellectual substance traditionally present in the cultural production of African descended communities. She brings black song (including Blues, Jazz Scat, and Rap) into classrooms, cultural institutions, and other learning environments to teach Social Studies, Science, and Language Arts through Arts-in-Education programs. Dr. K has also enjoyed a career as a facilitator of workshops on conflict resolution built on seven years of graduate study in Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. These skills were shaped through professional activity at the Girls Scouts of the USA, and with Educators for Social Responsibility in the New York City Public Schools. Her legacy from those engagements includes her re-telling of the traditional Caribbean tale, Rooster and Cockroach, and another story out of African-descended tradition with life-saving potential titled, Hide Anger Until Tomorrow. Her contemporary spiritual, Turn Me Round, so inspired the children of a Mennonite Peace camp that they learned it immediately and sang it, unprompted, for days on end.