Lupita Amondi Nyong'o (born March 1, 1983) is an actress and music video director of dual Kenyan and Mexican citizenship. She made her feature film debut in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) as Patsey, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, among numerous other awards and nominations. She is one of the few actors who has won an Academy Award for their debut performance in a feature film.
Nyong'o was born in Mexico City, Mexico, to Dorothy and Peter Anyang' Nyong'o, a politician in Kenya. It is a Luo tradition to name a child after the events of the day, so her parents named her Lupita (a diminutive of "Guadalupe" Our Lady of Guadalupe). She is of completely Luo descent on both sides of her family, and is the second of six children. Her father was the former Kenyan Minister for Medical Services. At the time of Lupita's birth, he was a visiting lecturer in political science at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, and her family had been living in Mexico for three years.
Nyong'o moved back to Kenya with her parents when she was less than one year old, when her father was appointed a professor at the University of Nairobi. She grew up primarily in Kenya, and describes her upbringing as "middle class, suburban". At age sixteen, her parents sent her back to Mexico for seven months to learn Spanish. During those seven months, Nyong'o lived in Taxco, Mexico, and took classes at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico's Learning Center for Foreigners.
In 2013, her father was elected to represent Kisumu County in the Kenyan Senate. Nyong'o's mother was the managing director of the Africa Cancer Foundation and owned her own communications company. In 2012, her older cousin, Isis Nyong'o, was named one of Africa's most powerful women by Forbes magazine. Her uncle, Aggrey Nyong'o, a prominent Kenyan physician, was killed in a road accident in 2002.
She was fluent in her native Luo, English, Swahili and Spanish. On February 27, 2014, at the Essence Black Women In Hollywood luncheon in Beverly Hills, Lupita gave a speech on black beauty. Lupita talked about a letter she received from a young fan who stated she was unhappy with herself until she saw the actress on the cover of a magazine. In her speech, Lupita talked about the insecurities she had about herself as a teenager; growing up as a dark skinned black girl, women that looked like her were barely portrayed in the media and when they were, they were not deemed as being beautiful. She said her views about herself changed when she saw South Sudanese supermodel Alek Wek become successful.
Nyong'o grew up in an artistic family, where family get-togethers often included performances by the children in the family and trips to see plays. She attended an all-girls school in Kenya and acted in school plays, with a minor role in Oliver Twist being her first play. At age 14, Nyong'o made her professional acting debut as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in a production by the Nairobi, Kenya-based repertory company Phoenix Players. While a member of the Phoenix Players, Nyong'o also performed in the plays "On The Razzle" and "There Goes The Bride". Nyong'o cites the performances of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey in The Color Purple with inspiring her to pursue a professional acting career.
Nyong'o attended college in the United States. After graduating from Hampshire College with a degree in film and theatre studies, she worked on the production crew of many films, including Fernando Meirelles's The Constant Gardener, with Ralph Fiennes, Mira Nair's The Namesake, and Salvatore Stabile's Where God Left His Shoes. She cites Fiennes as another individual who inspired her to pursue a professional acting career.
She starred in the 2008 short film East River, directed by Marc Grey and shot in Brooklyn, New York. She returned to Kenya in 2008 and starred in the Kenyan television series Shuga, an MTV Base Africa/UNICEF drama about HIV/AIDS prevention. In 2009, she wrote, directed, and produced the documentary In My Genes, about the treatment of Kenya's albino population, which played at several film festivals and won first prize at the 2008 Five College Film Festival. Nyong'o also directed the The Little Things You Do music video by Wahu featuring Bobi Wine, which was nominated for the Best Video Award at the MTV Africa Music Awards 2009.
Nyong'o subsequently enrolled in the acting program at the Yale School of Drama. At Yale she appeared in many stage productions, including Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and The Winter's Tale. While at Yale, she was the recipient of the Herschel Williams Prize "awarded to acting students with outstanding ability" during the 2011–2012 school year.
Nyong'o landed her breakout role when she was cast in 12 Years a Slave immediately before graduating from Yale with an MFA in 2012. The film was released in 2013 to great critical acclaim. Nyong'o received rave reviews for her performance, and was nominated for several awards including a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and two Screen Actors Guild Awards including Best Supporting Actress, which she won. She also co-starred in Liam Neeson's 2014 film Non-Stop.
On March 2, 2014, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the sixth black actress to win the award.
In 2014, she was chosen as one of the faces for Miu Miu's Spring 2014 campaign, with Elizabeth Olsen, Elle Fanning and Bella Heathcote. She also appeared on the covers of several magazines, including New York's Spring 2014 fashion issue and UK magazine Dazed & Confused. She was also a regular on Harper's Bazaar's Derek Blasberg's Best Dressed List.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Monday, February 10, 2014
A00001 - Jose Pacheco, Mexican Writer
José Emilio Pacheco, Honored Writer Who Wrote of Social Ills, Dies at 74
José Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican poet and author who achieved renown throughout the Spanish-speaking world with highly literate poems, essays and novels that used an array of styles to explore profound questions, died on Sunday in Mexico City. He was 74.
The cause was cardiorespiratory arrest, the National Council for Culture and the Arts, in Mexico, said. His wife, Cristina, told a radio audience on Monday that he had been hospitalized on Saturday after falling and hitting his head.
Mr. Pacheco was a literary lion who won numerous awards in Latin America. In 2009, Spain’s culture ministry awarded him the Miguel de Cervantes Literature Prize, the highest award given to a Spanish-language writer.
He emerged in the 1960s as one of a group of socially concerned poets and authors who addressed burning issues like pollution, poverty and governmental bureaucracy. His early poetry resonated with surrealist and symbolic imagery, but he soon turned to the simpler, more direct style that typified his more than a dozen books of poems.
The Times Literary Supplement, in London, suggested that Mr. Pacheco’s precision, restraint and balance made “the sense of evil and disaster in the poems the more striking.”
Writing about nature’s cruelty, Mr. Pacheco said of migrating fish, “Out of a thousand, 10 will reach the sea.” And humans, in his view, were the most violent creatures. “Fish don’t torture,” he wrote. “Their banks don’t ever charge interest.”
The meaning and meaninglessness of time were frequent concerns. Merlin H. Forster, who edited “Tradition and Renewal: Essays on Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature and Culture” (1975), wrote in an essay for that book, “Pacheco is painfully aware of cyclic time and transistory human experience.”
The opening line of Mr. Pacheco’s 1981 novella, “Battles in the Desert,” is, “I remember, I don’t remember.” Carlos, the novella’s narrator, later says, “I am going to keep my memory of this moment intact because everything that now exists will never be the same again.”
In “City of Memory,” published in Spanish in 1989 and in English in 1997, he wrote, “Tomorrow/ there will be no more roses/ but our gaze/ will hold their fire.”
José Emilio Pacheco was born in Mexico City on June 30, 1939, and attributed his love of letters to his grandparents. His grandmother told him Mexican legends, and his grandfather taught him to read.
He attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he studied law and literature and worked for literary publications but did not earn a degree. He made a point of not using his editorial positions to advance his work, instead publishing it elsewhere.
His collections of short stories, essays and poems were translated into German, French, English, Japanese and Russian. He translated works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, Harold Pinter, T. S. Eliot and Albert Einstein into Spanish. He taught at universities in Canada, England and the United States, including the University of Maryland, where for many years he taught during the fall semester. He helped edit literary journals throughout his life.
Mr. Pacheco’s survivors include his wife, a well-known cultural television journalist, and his daughters, Laura and Cecilia.
In later collections, Mr. Pacheco included poems that focused on animals as a device to criticize human behavior. Another technique he favored was to include fragments from other texts in his poems, even other poets’ work, a device he called approximation. One example was his Spanish translation of the American poet Ezra Pound’s translation of a Japanese version of an ancient Chinese poem.
Ultimately, he said that only poetry mattered, not poets, and claimed to be “leery of the literary circus.” He shrugged off the many accolades he received.
Referring to his friend Juan Gelman, the vaunted Argentine poet who lived in Mexico City and who died this month, Mr. Pacheco said, “I’m not the best poet in Mexico, not even of my neighborhood.”
Introduction
The biographies contained in this blog are the biographies of people who I have encountered over the last thirty years who made an impression on me. Some are famous people, many are not. However, I have found that even the biographies of those who are not famous are often as important as those of the ones who are famous. May God bless them all ... wherever they may be now.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Fairfield, California
August 25, 2023
November 6, 2023
March 26, 2024
July 19, 2024
August 28, 2024
My Tribute
The main notoriety I have achieved in this life is based upon my writing. I have written six books (Pan-African Chronology [three volumes], The Muslim Diaspora [two volumes], and The Creation [one volume]) which achieved some notoriety and I have begun three massive blogs Biographies, Who's Who in Islam and The Muslim Compendium which have garnered additional notoriety. However, whatever notoriety I have achieved for my writing has always seemed a bit undeserved. Truth be told, I write not for notoriety, but for God. In the coming days, I hope to be able to elaborate on why I do this. However, suffice it to say that every book I write and every blog I begin, begins with a tribute to God. I can only pray that God will continue to find what I write to be an expression of God's will.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Fairfield, California
November 28, 2021
March 26, 2024
July 19, 2024
August 28, 2024
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