Iowa City Poetry’s Mic Check Poetry Festival will return Nov. 11-12 after organizers Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey and Lisa Roberts received what Rainey called a “phenomenal showing” of support and enthusiasm last year. The November festival will be only […]
Editor’s note: After the initial publication of this story, the premiere of ‘This is Not a Game of Baseball’ was postponed due to COVID-19. More details at the end of the article. I spoke with Cavan Hallman, Curtis Jackson and […]
Caleb Rainey was voted Best Poet/Spoken Word Artist in Little Village’s 2020 Best of the CRANDIC awards. “The oldest poem I can think of was one in elementary school. Obviously, it rhymed,” Best Poet of the CRANDIC Caleb “The Negro […]
Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey’s second volume of poetry was self-published in October, just five months after his first volume (Look, Black Boy) was released. Heart Notes departs from race as its central topic and focuses on aspects of love, which Rainey explores through widely varying structures and types of poems. In fact, if you’ve ever wondered whether […]
Stage lights cast a blue hue on a lone mic as attendants trickled into the Englert Theatre to see the IC Speaks Showcase on Saturday night. About a dozen students from West, City, Liberty and Tate high schools filled the first two rows on the theater’s west side. In the hour and a half that followed, the students got up one by one to stand at […]
With his first self-published chapbook, Look, Black Boy, Caleb “The Negro Artist” Rainey confronts and challenges his readers while communicating with them on a variety of levels. The central theme of this short collection is how it feels to be a young black man in 2019 in the Midwest. […]
Caleb Rainey, aka the Negro Artist, came to Iowa City to earn an English major at the University of Iowa. Rainey was one of only 57 black men, in his undergraduate class of over 4,000 first-year students, who were not part of a Hawkeye sports team. […]
Little Village Issue 321
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Rec'd 2023
Central Iowa Issue 014
Eastern Iowa Issue 318
