Black Pearls: Improvisations on a Lost Year

Sascha Feinstein grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the only child of parents who were both artists. While he was still in high school, his mother was diagnosed with cancer and died less than a year later. It was during the trying period of his mother's illness that he became consumed by jazz, both as an emotional salvation and as a necessary form of escape. Later, during his college years, he discovered the crossovers between jazz and poetry, and a life's love was forged. Feinstein's passion for the creative arts and his fragmented memories of the heartbreaking loss of his mother entwined to become the book Black Pearls. In the spirit of jazz improvisation, these gentle, evocative essays are governed by theme and variation more than by strict chronology, each essay repositioning riffs and choruses of personal experience within the broader cultural landscapes of literature, painting, and music. Although the project began as an exploration into the archeological nature of lost memory, it matured into a far more expansive understanding of personal identity.

SASCHA FEINSTEIN is a poet, essayist, and editor. In addition to works of poetry--his collection Misterioso won the inaugural Hayden Carruth Award--he is the author of Ask Me Now: Conversations on Jazz & Literature and of Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present. He is also the coeditor, with Yusef Komunyakaa, of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume, The Second Set, and the founding editor of Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature. He holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in American literature. In September 2008, Feinstein was named Pennsylvania’s Artist of the Year as part of the annual Governor’s Awards for the Arts. He teaches at Lycoming College, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and in the MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. An accomplished saxophonist, he also hosts a weekly radio show, ＂Jazz Standards,＂ on WVIA.