Touré

Touré (born March 20, 1971) is an American novelist, music journalist, cultural critic, and television personality based in New 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-American Utopia, 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 about Run-DMC. Since 1997, he has been a Contributing Editor at Rolling Stone, writing primarily about hip hop. He has written cover stories about Alicia 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 about Dale Earnhardt Jr., a story that ended up in the Best American Sportswriting of 2001. He has often evoked the participatory journalism of George Plimpton or Tom Wolfe, while, for example, playing high-stakes poker with Jay-Z, two-on-two basketball with Prince, one-on-one basketball with Wynton Marsalis, tennis with Jennifer 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 black saxophonist 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 to London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and New 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 With Tina Brown", and "The O'Reilly Factor". In 2003, he became the host of "Spoke N' Heard" on MTV2, a weekly half-hour interview show. Guests included Zadie Smith, Kanye West, Nas, Puff Daddy, Professor Cornel West, Lenny Kravitz, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Questlove, Talib Kweli, Alicia Keys, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and Jay-Z. In 2004 he became CNN's first pop culture correspondent, covering the Oscars and the Grammys and talking about pop culture on a recurring segment on "American Morning" called "90 Second Pop," hosted by Soledad O'Brien and Bill Hemmer. In 2005, Touré left CNN and became a correspondent for Black 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" on WNYC, New York City's largest public radio station.

His new show "I'll Try Anything Once" debuted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008, at 8pm Eastern and Pacific time, on Treasure HD. The 13 episode, half-hour show features Touré attempting challenges each week, like a more intellectual version of "Jackass". He enters a demolition derby in Indiana, works as a bull-dodging rodeo clown in Wyoming, assists an extreme pest control man in the Florida panhandle extricate 60,000 bees and chase a 15-foot boa constrictor, attends movie stuntman school and has to jump off the high tower backwards, studies lumberjack sports like log rolling and boom running in Wisconsin, and plays a game as a wide receiver on a women's semi-pro American football team called the Tucson 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 from Milton Academy, a prep school in Milton, Massachusetts. On March 19, 2005, he married Rita Nakouzi on a beach in Miami, with Rev. Run from Run-DMC as the officiant and Nelson George as the best man. Touré and his wife live in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, 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]