Miles Marshall Lewis

Growing up in the northeast Bronx in the 1980s, Miles Marshall Lewis had Queen Latifah and Kurtis Blow for neighbors and Doug E. Fresh's producer for a high school choir director. He danced in the video for Doug E. Fresh's "Keep Risin' to the Top" in 1987 and attended Morehouse College in Atlanta during the socially conscious "golden age" era of hip-hop culture. While later attending the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, Lewis became an acclaimed music journalist writing for Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and elsewhere. In the late '90s, he worked briefly as an editor for Vibe and XXL magazines. In 2004, Lewis published one of the first critically acclaimed hip-hop generation memoirs, entitled "Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don't Have Bruises." The same year, he moved to Paris, France, in response to the Iraq War, inspired by black expatriate forebears like James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Lewis is the founder and editor of "Bronx Biannual," described as an urbane urban literary journal containing exceptional fiction and essays from today's top writers.