Sun Ra

Herman Poole Blount (Sun Ra) was born and raised in Alabama became involved in the jazz scene in Chicago after World War II. He abandoned his birth name, taking the name Sun Ra (from the Egyptian God of the Sun named Ra). He became a leader of Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic and style that combines science fiction, fantasy, and Afrocentrism to re-imagine the African tradition. He lived in New York in the 1960s, before relocating his music group to Philadelphia in 1968. His writing has been published in The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose (2006). A series of “Space Poetry” LPs containing Ra's spoken word performances were released in 2010.