His mother and his sister each suffered from a debilitating mental illness. His older brother was imprisoned in a faraway state. The city is truly a character in its own right, and it’s served me well because the people I was exposed to gave me that cultural rootedness.” – MK Asante “Philly is a state of mind I’m always in. Lol oh the irony."īorn in Zimbabwe, MK Asante set out to write his story by returning to the state of mind he had as a black teen growing up in North Philadelphia. "The young buck that got expelled from schools," he wrote, "has now given graduation speeches at #Harvard, #ASU, #UCLA, #UW, etc. Two weeks ago, for ThrowBack Thursday, he posted a photo on his Instagram account from the graduate keynote speech he gave at Vassar College last year. Through his creative writing and film classes at the university to his many visits to Baltimore schools, Asante is closing that distance. Mark Twain said, don't let school get in the way of your education. It's about the difference and the distance between school and education. It's about miseducation, reeducation, self-education, street education. Well, I think first of all, the story is about education. In an interview on National Public Radio, after the memoir's release, he said: Asante, of course, went on to write a critically acclaimed 2013 memoir, Buck, which he is now adapting for the screen through a Sundance Institute grant.Ī poet, hip-hop artist and filmmaker, he joined the faculty of Morgan State University in Baltimore at the age of 23, and became its youngest tenured professor three years later.
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