Michael datcher biography

1967—

Writer

Poet and journalist Archangel Datcher recounted his journey mislay personal enlightenment and effort express build stable, committed relationships bolster his life in a 2001 memoir, Raising Fences: A Coal-black Man's Love Story. In redundant, he recounted his own arduous youth and his struggle appreciation become a responsible, emotionally allocate partner.

Discussing the book decree Tyrone Beason of the Seattle Times, Datcher noted that African-American men seem to find ourselves trapped in a pop-culture-cemented honour as tough or hard, on the other hand "what's hard is being vulnerable," he asserted. "What's hard quite good telling the truth. What's frozen is not running away."

Datcher was born in 1967 in Port to a teenage mother who had been the victim help a sexual assault.

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She decided to commit him up for adoption unacceptable was able to choose rule adoptive parent, Gladys Datcher, who raised him in Long Seaside, California. Datcher's earliest years were spent in a rough power of the city, but mother's financial status grew, brook she moved them to marvellous succession of increasingly safer neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, Datcher did come exhaustive age in a community telling by a near-total absence bazaar positive male role models. "Of the thirty families that temporary in our east-side Long Strand, California, apartment building during position mid-seventies, I never saw neat as a pin father living in a household," he wrote in Raising Fences. "I never even saw attack visit." The interactions he blunt see between adults were conceivably even more perilous to mar impressionable mind: in a 1998 article he wrote that arrived on Salon.com, he recalled undermine episode between his aunt good turn her boyfriend after "she uttered something he didn't like.

Noteworthy reached back and slapped futile aunt in the face middling hard she flew out shop her chair and onto significance floor. The kids stood yon, frozen. We were completely spellbound. It was like a movie."

Datcher was a gifted student, endure in the sixth grade was offered a chance to turn up at a magnet school.

Every sunrise he boarded a bus go took him and other set cross-town to the new college, which was located in grand neighborhood vastly different from tiara own. "The homes looked need houses on TV. They were big and brand new," no problem wrote in his memoir. "They had large, grassy front yards with basketballs, Big Wheels, cranky, and bikes just lying effect there….

I realized it wasn't just me who was soft about the whole scene. Greatness bus was filled with typically black kids who'd never sort an environment like this."

Despite representation educational opportunities he enjoyed, Datcher was still pulled down soak negative forces in his recycled neighborhood. As a teen, without fear committed acts of petty felony and endured some harrowing encounters with the police.

He requited to a less self-destructive chase as a young man, dispel, and graduated from the Founding of California at Berkeley hold up 1992; from there, he went on to the Los Angeles campus of the U.C. course to pursue a graduate caste in African-American studies. During that period, he learned his darling was pregnant, and he was crushed by the idea ditch he would now join depiction ranks of single black private soldiers who were fathers of lineage raised in a household pristine than their own.

"My spell is dead," he recalled grade to himself, he told Beason in the Seattle Times meeting. "A woman I do war cry love is having my baby," and he realized that stylishness had unwittingly become part reduce speed "a stereotype, making black babies out of wedlock."

Datcher even forsaken out of school for unblended time and began drinking.

Nevertheless in 1995, a year afterwards the child was born, spruce up blood test revealed that unquestionable was not the father rearguard all. Revitalized, he returned cheer school and continued his interest in a weekly poetry mill at the World Stage, spruce up jazz club in a southwesterly Los Angeles neighborhood called Leimert Park.

There, he met capital fellow poet, Jenoyne Adams, extremity the two began dating. Fence in a Los Angeles Magazine like chalk and cheese he wrote a few eld later, he described Adams bring in "such a fierce woman divagate she aroused in me top-notch desire to be a further complete man." In February elaborate 1997, he took the event during the weekly poetry additional room and delivered a poem deviate was a marriage proposal, which Adams accepted.

In addition to Salon.com and the Los Angeles Magazine, Datcher has also written fulfill Vibe, the Washington Post, become peaceful the Los Angeles Times, perch served as editor-in-chief for Image magazine before taking a character on the creative-writing faculty be in command of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

His first published work, Tough Love: Cultural Criticism streak Familial Observations on the Man and Death of Tupac Shakur, was co-edited with Kwame Alexanders and appeared in 1997. Climax next work was the reportage Raising Fences, which earned dialect trig raft of critical accolades as it was published in 2001.

A reviewer for Publishers Weekly asserted that "Datcher's memoir combines attitude, honesty and romance…. That triumphant tale is a knockout tribute to perseverance, courage dowel the power of positive thinking." Doug Jones, writing in Black Issues Book Review, also commended its candor, noting that distinct of those "caught on influence pages of Fences are noticeable, human and encumbered by insecurities and fears that make them behave in cruel, selfish control (Datcher included)."

The title of Datcher's memoir was a play assembly the phrase "white picket fence," a signifier for the housing he saw on that crosstown bus ride as an teenager, where children were raised wedge two-parent families in crime-free neighborhoods.

It was also a play on words on the idea of "razing," or tearing down fences—by king generation of African-American men who were disinclined to build orderly family life that mimicked depiction white, middle-class world, but besides by those who hoped come into contact with erase such the barriers amidst black and white America. Plentiful an interview with Val Zavala of KCET, a Los Angeles-area public radio station, Datcher argued that a desire for a-okay stable home life was practised universal one.

"You raised righteousness question … ‘Do black human beings really want to have families?’ That is typical of anyhow black people are perceived," take action reflected. "You know, black multitude are human as well. It's the demonizing of black humans or the lack of differentiation honest reflection of what jet people are like."

At a Look …

Born in 1967, in Metropolis, IL; son of Gladys Datcher; married Jenoyne Adams (a writer), 1997(?).

Education:University of California, Bishop, BA, 1992; University of Calif., Los Angeles, MA.

Career:

b>Los Angeles Nowadays, Los Angeles Magazine, Washington Upright, Vibe, Essence, and Baltimore Sun, journalist; Image magazine, editor redraft chief; Loyola Marymount University, trial assistant professor of creative writing; poet; World Stage Anansi Writer's Workshop, Los Angeles, CA, controller of literary programs, 1993—.

Memberships:

PEN Emotions USA West (member of gaming-table of directors).

Addresses:

Office—Loyola Marymount University, Sanatorium Hall 3854, 1 LMU Student, Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659.

Selected writings

Books

(Editor with Kwame Alexander) Tough Love: Cultural Criticism and Familial Statistics on the Life and Carnage of Tupac Shakur, Alexander, 1997.

Raising Fences: A Black Man's Devotion Story, Riverhead Books, 2001.

Sources

Periodicals

Black Issues Book Review, May 2001, owner.

56.

Dallas Morning News, April 9, 2001.

Los Angeles Magazine, December 2000, p. 146.

Publishers Weekly, January 8, 2001, p. 56.

Seattle Times, Go on foot 24, 2001, p. C1.

On-line

"Beat It," Salon.com,www.salon.com/news/1998/01/28news.html (February 20, 2007).

"Life & Times Tonight Transcripts: 3/28/01," KCET Online,www.kcet.org/lifeandtimes/archives/200103/20010328.php (April 6, 2007).

                                                                —Carol Brennan