St. Louis native Quincy Troupe received one of two Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation in its 2010 American Book Awards. Troupe – a poet, essayist and ghost writer of Miles Davis’ autobiography – was joined by columnist and poet Katha Pollitt as the 2010 Lifetime Achievers.
The Oakland-based foundation’s goal is “to provide recognition and a wider audience for the wealth of cultural and ethnic diversity that constitutes American writing” – in implicit opposition to the better-known writing awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, which “are given by the Eastern literary establishment, mostly to white males,” Troupe told The American.
Previous Lifetime Achievement awardees from the Before Columbus Foundation include Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka and Sonja Sanchez. “Though it’s not just limited to people of color,” Troupe said. Indeed, his fellow 2010 Lifetime Achievement awardee, Pollitt, is Jewish.
The American Book Awards offer no cash prize. Winners are nominated and selected by a panel of writers, editors and publishers “who also represent the diversity of American literary culture,” according to the foundation.
In addition to Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis and the memoir Miles and Me, Troupe is the author of many books of poetry (most recently, The Architecture of Language) and children’s books about Stevie Wonder and Magic Johnson.
“It recognizes the achievement of a lifetime of work, but it doesn’t mean you don’t have to do anything else,” Troupe said of the award. “They give it to people who have done significant work in the past – and hopefully will do significant work in the future.”
Troupe’s future as a writer already has been charted, to some extent. Next year Coffee House Press (which has published four books of his poems since 1996) will come out with a new volume, Erranceties, featuring “new poems, from 2006 up to now, 150 pages or so,” Troupe said.
He invented the word he chose for the title, based on a root for the verb “to wander.”
“I travel a lot, and I write poems wherever I am,” Troupe said. “These poems are based on a lot of different places: Guadalupe, Brazil, all over Europe, Ecuador, different places in the U.S. I have a certain restlessness.”
In 2012 Troupe will add to his oeuvre of children’s books with a book about Ray Charles to be published by Hyperion. Later that year, Coffee House Press will publish a substantial book of his selected nonfiction titled Cross-Fertilization.
Somewhere along the way – with Hollywood, it is hard to be sure exactly when – Troupe will appear on the big screen, portrayed by Laurence Fishburne, in a film about Miles Davis based on Troupe’s book and using his screenplay. Director James Gray plans to shoot this winter, with Samuel Jackson playing Miles and Halle Berry playing a composite character based on the primary African-American women in Miles’ life.
“This is what they tell me,” Troupe said. “Hollywood doesn’t particularly like writers coming around until they ask you to come around – though none of them knew Miles.”
Troupe also is three-quarters of the way finished with a novel titled The Legacy of Charlie Footman. Troupe said, “I’ve been writing it for 19 years. I finally got a bead on it in the last year and a half. There were some structural problems I couldn’t solve, and I finally solved them.” He said the novel “takes in most of the 20th century” and spans from Georgia to St. Louis, New York, Paris and Los Angeles in what promises (or threatens) to be a 500-page panorama.
He also is working on the first part of what he sees as a three-part memoir to be titled The Accordion Years, covering 1965-1990, and touching upon well-known St. Louis-area figures such as Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, Julius Hemphill, Donald M. Suggs and K. Curtis Lyle.
“I’m not into settling scores, but I’ll tell things as I view them,” Troupe said (or threatened) – “some things like why people don’t invite me to read in St. Louis anymore.”
Troupe is a former editor of the St. Louis-based literary magazine River Styx and was once a regular at its reading series, but in recent years he has exchanged words with current editor and organizer Richard Newman in a lengthy Riverfront Times update on the organization.
George Sams of the Nu-Art Series may invite Troupe to St. Louis early next year, after hearing a recording of Troupe reading with the guitarist Kelvin Bell – yet another Troupe project, a CD, slated for release next year. Sams joined a large crowd in San Francisco and Oakland (that also included the writer Ishmael Reed and the artist Oliver Jackson) last month to celebrate Troupe’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
“I go everywhere else to read my work but my own hometown, but I’m not a whiner,” Troupe said.
Just a winner.
