Loving You Is Like A Party

Professor Arturo (AKA Arthur Pfister) returns to the Stam-ford area tomorrow night as Barnes & Noble’s Open Mic guest reader. As a poet/fiction writer, spoken work artist, educator, editor and speech-writer, Arturo draws on decades of plying and living the jazz idiom to relate pieces of justice, the heart and life crafted with a magnetic conviction.

Originally from New Orleans, he has collaborated on numerous projects with an amazing array of partners, such as musicians, photographers, dancers, fire-eaters, waiters, cab drivers and other members of the Great Miscellaneous.

His work has been placed in Fahari, American Poetry Review, the Shooting Star Review, EBONY, the Gallery Mirror and numerous other publica-tions. He has also contributed to the anthologies A Broadside Treasury: 1965-1970 (Broadside Press, 1971), edited by Gwendolyn Brooks, Orde Coombs’ We Speak as Liberators (Dodd Mead, 1970) and Lindahl’s,  Owens’ and Harvison’s Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana (University Press of Mississippi, 1997). My Name is New Orleans: 40 Years of Poetry & Other Jazz (Margaret Media, Inc., 2009), his latest volume, is a multimedia project that comes with a CD of six jazz poetry readings from the book.

Here is a sampling of the Professor at his most warm and sensual from "Jazz for My Baby":

You’ve changed, but change makes me wanna hustle for salt peanuts on summer days

For all we know we’ll be together again bumpin’ on sunset at a freedom jazz dance

Loving you is like a party

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! What a wonderful world!

It’s a love supreme

      a love supreme

      a love supreme…

This live 2012 performance of the entire poem from his new collection reveals the captivating effect of his fluid swaying between recitation and song and back again: 

Below, Arturo is at his galvanizing best in the name of social change at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas at The Maple Leaf in New Orleans in 2006, after having to evacuate the city from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina the year prior:

One of the original Broadside poets of the 1960s, Professor Arturo took part last August in PoemAlley’s “Café Night” program outside the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stam-ford. He currently teaches at Norwalk Community College. Find out more at his blog, professorarturo.blogspot.com.

Hosted by Frank Chambers and PoemAlley's Nick Miele, the Barnes & Noble's Open Mic Poetry program meets the second Monday of each month in the cookbook section on the main floor of the bookstore (located in the Stamford Town Center), beginning at 7:00 p.m.

For more information, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place Suite H009

Stamford, CT 06901

203-323-1248