Kathryn Takara has known rivers, trees, oceans, mountains and volcanoes. Her latest collection of poetry Tourmalines: Beyond the Ebony Portal solidifies her role as a true multi-culturalist. The learned scholar, poet, professor and author came of age in the segregated south and continued to thrive and create through the civil rights movement, the new Black Renaissance of the 1990’s and the first decade of the millennium. In the eighties, Takara helped quell racial tensions in Hawai`i and worked diligently to make Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday a state holiday. I believe that Takara and her contemporaries helped pave the way for America’s first African American president, Barack Obama.
– Shelah Moody, writer, San Francisco Chronicle, CityFlight.com
Kathryn Takara captures the mythic and the modern in her lyrical portrayal of her journey from the segregated South, through the Civil Rights movement and across the Pacific to the islands of Hawai`i. Each tourmaline mirrors her creativity, activism, passion, and desire for freedom; both individually and as part of the African Diaspora. These are absolutely my favorite poems as she travels to a “destiny beyond Dixie” to inspire hope in a time of despair.
– Karla Brundage, MA, writer, teacher, editor
In this evocative collection, Tourmalines: Beyond the Ebony Portal, Kathryn Waddell Takara first shares her knowledge of Greek and Egyptian mythology through richly wrought lyrics we read as poems, before she travels through her childhood, eventually paying tribute to powerful voices like Maya Angelou’s and Kwamé Turé’s. I chew on her verses as if they were a literal feast of fresh fruits glistening like cut crystals. Continually, Kathryn allows us to glimpse the jewels in her mind that manifest themselves, once again, as sheer poetry.
– Allison E. Francis, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Chaminade University of Honolulu and performance poet
Whether the individual poems in Tourmalines are reflections on myths and origins, home-memories, tributes to Blacks artists and intellectuals, fiery political statements, or tender expressions to family members, they are characterized by Kathryn Takara’s ability to find the many-hued, sometimes flawed, often healing, crystalline heart of her subjects, and to shine her particular poetic light through them. The collection has the clarity, sharpness and dazzle of a bed of crystals.
– Paul Lyons, Professor, English Dept, University of Hawai`i at Manoa
The jewels of Africa shine through the poetry of Kay Takara.
– Daphne Barbee Wooten, Esq.