Arthur Flowers

Arthur Flowers is a storyteller, blues singer, and author from Memphis, Tennessee. He is a blues-based performance poet in the griot style, a reference to the troubadours of West Africa that have been transmitting the history of their people in the oral tradition since the 14th century.

In 2010, Flowers collaborated with Manu Chitrakar, a scroll-painter from Bengal, for I See the Promised Land, ‘an extraordinary jam session between two very distinctive storytelling traditions’, recounting the life of Martin Luther King Jr.

Flowers teaches Creative Writing at Syracuse University in the English Department’s MFA program. He is the Co-Founder of the New Renaissance Guild and has served as the Executive Director of the Harlem Writers Guild, the oldest organization of African-American writers founded in 1950.