BIOGRAPHIES

(in alphabetical order)

BEAT JUNKIES

Hailing from Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Beat Junkies are one of the world's top Turntablist crews. Founded in 1992 by the crew's president J-Rocc, this group has been making noise within the Hip Hop and music industry for the last five years with their incredible scratching and beat juggling abilities along with their love for the music and for the art form. They have won the prestigious DJ battles as the DMC, the Superman and the ITF competitions and performed throughout U.S. and around the world.

COMMON

A native of Chicago's South Side, Common, aka Rashid Lynn is an MCA Recording artist who has been described as "the most thoughtful, lyrically skilled rapper you've never heard of." (Rolling Stone Magazine). His fourth album Like Water for Chocolate is an African-American youth's voyage through post-Reagan pre-millennial Afro-Americana; an intrusion into the life of a young man striving to follow a positive road in life, minus the self righteousness. He also has created the Common Ground Foundation to raise capital to fund community centers, summer camps, scholarships and prison education programs.

dead prez

Considered the most politically conscious group since Public Enemy, the duo, who go by the names stic.man and M-1, was first introduced on the Loud Records '97 Set Up compilation tape that featured "Food, Clothes and Shelter." Their coming of age track was featured in the 1997 feature-film soundtrack for the baseball documentary, Soul in the Hole. Their debut album Let's Get Free includes "Police State," a song featured on the HBO prison documentary Thugged Out: Locked Down in America. The group is working on the Red Hot and Rhapsody AIDS project scheduled for release this year.

MICHAEL S. HARPER

Hailed by critics as a distinctive and powerful presence in contemporary American poetry, Michael S. Harper is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including the just-released Songlines in Michaeltree and the 1971 History is Your Own Heartbeat, which won the Black Academy of Arts & Letters award for poetry. Images of Kin won the Melville-Cane award from the Poetry Society of America. A professor of English at Brown University, Harper was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1997.

CALVIN HERNTON

Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and social scientist, Calvin Hernton the author of eight books, including the best-selling Sex And Racism In America, which has been translated into seven languages, and the ground-breaking The Sexual Mountain And Black Women Writers: Adventures in Sex, Literature, and Real Life. Emeritus Professor of English at Oberlin, Hernton also has written two collections of poetry: Medicine Man and The Coming of Chronos to the House of Nightsong.

SAUL WILLIAMS

Williams exploded on the spoken-word circuit in 1995. The next year he became the Nuyorican Poet Café's Grand Slam Champion. He also is the leading actor and co-writer of Slam, the highly acclaimed independent film which took prizes at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and the Cannes Film Festival. The Brooklyn-born and now L.A.-based actor has since been lauded as one of the most "powerful voices of the hip-hop generation." He is the author of the poetry collection The Seventh Octave and SHE (MTV / Pocket Books),Williams' hard look at his "feminine side." This year, he has performed for audiences throughout the U.S., United Kingdom, Turkey, France and Brazil.

6 Million Ways To Speak: The Oberlin Community Hip-Hop Conference 2000