Cosmic Deputy is a literary memoir from esteemed activist, educator,
producer, and poet Kalamu ya Salaam. Representative poems from Salaam's
fifty years of writing are interspersed in an overarching essay tracing
the poet's multitude of influences. Toward mapping a theory of a Black
literary aesthetic, Salaam explores the cultural inheritances of Black
resistance movements, blues music, and the ways in which these sources
and others have shaped not only his own work but Black letters more
broadly.