Content Development Process of “The Collected Works of Prince Akbar aka Jus Rhymz “

This Friday the artist Lajuana Lampkins is publishing The Collected Works of Prince Akbar aka Jus Rhymz which she edited.

I have been working to help produce  this book with Lajuana for a little more than 2 years. This week I want to share  details on the mechanics of getting this book done, starting today with the content development.

The first working title of this book was They Killed A Minister, and it was centered on Prince’s death in January 2010. The way we developed the content was that Lajuana would text me and send me Facebook messages about what she wanted in the book and I would copy/ paste the text into a Google doc.

It’s kind of stunning how fast this kind of content—  the one-way expression of a story, of a set of experiences and feelings, can turn into a book-length document.

We would meet periodically to chat, buy art, and plan what she wanted for the book. Lajuana is devoted to getting justice for her son.

As the pandemic took hold, we’d use outdoor spaces to do our work. The cafe at Foxtrot, the green benches in front of Dove’s Luncheonette. Working in the open, accessible to her public. It was a joy to hear more about how she approaches her Arte Agora work– lots of this will be published this Fall in my book, Spots & Methods in Arte Agora.

The early output of this effort was the preface which I published in October 2021 to coordinate with an art opening.

During winter months we continued to work on the book and I was ready with a draft. I went to FedEx Kinkos on North Avenue and comped it up so that we can see it for the first time the way he would look in real life.

Lajuana took a lot of time with the draft and her decision was that there was too much of her in the book and not enough of Prince. She started to turn to the idea of putting more of Prince’s poetry and essays into the book.

Seeing things in real life has a way of crystallizing the editing process. She went back into her storage locker and sifted through decades of material that she had saved while she was in prison. She came out with dozens of pages of original work including printouts of blog posts that have long disappeared from the internet.

We had a seminal meeting at Dimo’s Pizza, where I talked about my own experience as a poet in the Chicago poetry scene more than a decade prior to when Prince was active. We talked about Def Poetry, and the hold it had on culture for a short period. We talked about slam poetry and the Green Mill and Prince’s role in the literary life of the city.

I read, on 8 &1/2 x 11 sheets of paper, printouts of a Blogger blog– essays from Prince on Obama’s election night, on being caught in gun violence, of living inside mental health facilities.

It became clear, with this material, that Prince played a keystone role in the political, cultural, and poetic life of Chicago. A prophetic public intellectual of the 2000s.

Lajuana reorganized the entire book, give me a new outline of its contents, and we focused on what this book would be.

What we thought was an examination of an unjust death turned into the publication of the fecund output an important life.

Friday is the day.