Click here to see information about Bronx Biannual, edited by Miles Marshall Lewis

And check out The Official Website of Bronx Biannual: The Literary Journal of Urbane Urban Literature

Click here to read an excerpt from Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises

An authentic and riveting hip-hop memoir in the Joan Didion tradition from Bronx native Lewis.

"Lewis has composed an observant and urbane B-boy's rites of passage, one which deftly transports us from the Boogie Down better known as the Bronx to the Champs Elysees. Herein find a hip-hop bildungsroman told in prose full of buoyancy and bounce, generously stocked with revelations about black transatlantic culture and romance that are as much a generation's as the writer's own." --Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk

Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises is a confessional, stylistic account (in the Joan Didion tradition) of coming of age in the Bronx alongside the birth and evolution of hip-hop culture. This essay collection presents a journalistic mosaic of seminal figures in hip-hop, documentary essays exploring the social decay of hip-hop, and a substantial element of memoir, as well as observations on the generational issues of urban America.

Scars captures the political ambitions of Russell Simmons, the Black Spades gang foundation of Afrika Bambaataa and the Universal Zulu Nation, the spiritual sensibility of KRS-One and the Temple of Hip-Hop, and a keynoted debate on the materialistic, violent direction of hiphop culture. Interpreting the mood and inner-city atmosphere that caused the counterculture of hip-hop, Bronx native Miles Marshall Lewis details the circumstances of his father's heroin addiction, his mother's Southern spirituality, his grandfather's career as a Harlem numbers runner, and his own journey from a tenement-building upbringing to worldwide travels--with hip-hop trailing his steps.

An incisive look at contemporary urban American life, Scars exposes the motivations and aspirations of a culture whose spiritual center was the Bronx.

Miles Marshall Lewis is the author of Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises (Akashic Books, 2004). During the late 1990s, he was the Music Editor of Vibe, the Deputy Editor of XXL, and the Literary Editor of Russell Simmons's Oneworld. His essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, Blender, The Source, LA Weekly, The Fader, The Face, The Believer, Essence, and many other publications. He was recognized for writing a Notable Essay of 1999 by Da Capo Best Music Writing 2000, and his fiction has appeared in Oneworld, Rap Pages, Brown Sugar 3: When Opposites Attract (Washington Square Press, 2004) and the upcoming Wanderlust (Plume, 2006). Lewis currently resides in Paris, France. A graduate of Morehouse College with a degree in Sociology, Lewis also studied at the Fordham University School of Law. He is completing a forthcoming book on Sly and the Family Stone entitled There's a Riot Goin' On (Continuum Books, 2006) as well as a novel, The Magic Kingdom of Christmas Muse.