- Touré
Touré (born
March 20 ,1971 ) is an Americannovelist ,music journalist ,cultural critic , and television personality based inNew York City .Biography
Touré has written three books: "The Portable Promised Land" (2003), a collection of
short stories , "Soul City" (2004), a magical realist novel about life in an African-AmericanUtopia , and "Never Drank the Kool-Aid" (2006), a collection of his writing from "Rolling Stone ", "The New Yorker ", "The New York Times ", the "Village Voice ", "The Believer", "Playboy ", "TENNIS Magazine ", and others, written between 1994 and 2005.In 1992, his junior year at
Emory University , Touré dropped out of college and became an intern at "Rolling Stone". He was fired after a few months but weeks later was asked to write record reviews and then feature stories. His first feature was aboutRun-DMC . Since 1997, he has been a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone, writing primarily about hip hop. He has written cover stories aboutAlicia Keys ,50 Cent ,Eminem ,Beyoncé , DMX,Lauryn Hill , and, in December 2005,Jay-Z , a story called [http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/8898314 "The Book of Jay"] . He has also written aboutDale Earnhardt Jr. , a story that ended up in the Best American Sportswriting of 2001. He has often evoked the participatory journalism ofGeorge Plimpton orTom Wolfe , while, for example, playing high-stakespoker with Jay-Z, two-on-two basketball with Prince, one-on-one basketball withWynton Marsalis , tennis withJennifer Capriati , or writing illegal graffiti with known graffiti artists.In 1996, upset that a feature story he'd written for "The New Yorker" was rejected, he enrolled in the graduate school for creative writing at
Columbia University to learn more about non-fiction. He took a fiction writing class and wrote a story about a blacksaxophonist in Harlem named Sugar Lips Shinehot who loses the ability to see white people called "The Sad Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and the Portable Promised Land". The second story he wrote, about a dangerously sexual preacher, was called "A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls and the Spectacular Final Sunday Sermon of the Right Revren Daddy Love." After it won an award from the magazine "", he embarked on a fiction writing career.After a year at Columbia, Touré left to write a biography of rapper
KRS-One . He traveled with KRS toLondon ,Frankfurt ,Amsterdam , andNew Jersey , interviewing him for over a year until KRS abruptly shelved the project.Television
His television career began in the late 1990s with occasional appearances on talk shows like "The Today Show", "
Dateline NBC ",CNN 's "American Morning ",Paula Zahn Now ,Anderson Cooper 360° , "Topic A WithTina Brown ", and "The O'Reilly Factor ". In 2003, he became the host of "Spoke N' Heard" onMTV2 , a weekly half-hour interview show. Guests includedZadie Smith ,Kanye West , Nas,Puff Daddy , ProfessorCornel West ,Lenny Kravitz ,Method Man ,Ghostface Killah ,Questlove ,Talib Kweli , Alicia Keys, the ReverendAl Sharpton , and Jay-Z. In 2004 he became CNN's firstpop culture correspondent, covering theOscars and theGrammys and talking about pop culture on a recurring segment on "American Morning" called "90 Second Pop," hosted bySoledad O'Brien andBill Hemmer . In 2005, Touré left CNN and became a correspondent forBlack Entertainment Television (BET) where he hosts a show called "The Black Carpet" which airs on Thursdays at 8pm.Touré has filled in as occasional substitute host of the arts and culture interview program "
The Leonard Lopate Show " onWNYC , New York City's largestpublic radio station.His new show "
I'll Try Anything Once " debuted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008, at 8pm Eastern and Pacific time, onTreasure HD . The 13 episode, half-hour show features Touré attempting challenges each week, like a more intellectual version of "Jackass". He enters ademolition derby inIndiana , works as a bull-dodgingrodeo clown inWyoming , assists an extreme pest control man in theFlorida panhandle extricate 60,000bees and chase a 15-footboa constrictor , attends movie stuntman school and has to jump off the high tower backwards, studies lumberjack sports likelog rolling and boom running inWisconsin , and plays a game as awide receiver on a women's semi-proAmerican football team called theTucson Monsoon . Just before the game begins he discovers that the other team's coach has offered $80 to anyone on his team who can lay Touré out.Personal life
Touré was given his name by his mother after she read an article in Time Magazine about then President of
Guinea ,Sekou Touré . In 1989, he graduated fromMilton Academy , a prep school inMilton, Massachusetts . OnMarch 19 ,2005 , he married Rita Nakouzi on a beach inMiami , withRev. Run fromRun-DMC as the officiant andNelson George as thebest man . Touré and his wife live in theFort Greene neighborhood ofBrooklyn , New York. On November 14th, 2007, his son Hendrix was born. Hendrix made his TV debut on The Black Carpet on Thursday, March 13th.External links
* [http://www.toure.com Touré's website]
* [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/fashion/weddings/27vows.html?ex=1140498000&en=6a7e08308d86fb1e&ei=5070 The New York Times weddings page]
* [http://thecareercookbook.com/article.php?article_id=42 The Career Cookbook Touré profile]
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