Todd Bryant Weeks is a Brooklyn based jazz historian and trade unionist. His 2008 book, Luck’s In My Corner: The Life and Music of Hot Lips Page (Routledge), received a 2009 Certificate of Merit for Best Research in Recorded Jazz Music from the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, a national award. Weeks is a regular contributor to Allegro, the News Magazine of the American Federation of Musicians, Local 802 and his writing has appeared in the Annual Review of Jazz Studies, Forever Harlem: Celebrating America’s Most Diverse Community, Uptown Magazine, Dippermouth News, and the New York Amsterdam News. Weeks is the 2004 recipient of the Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Fellowship from Rutgers University-Newark and has received two awards for his labor writing from the International Labor Communication Association. Weeks has worked as an adjunct at Rutgers University-Newark and with the Bard Prison Initiative, where he lectured on jazz and its importance to American culture with emphasis on a re-contextualization of jazz in American history, aesthetics, race politics, economic trends, and sociological themes. Weeks has given talks and papers on jazz and literature at various venues and institutions including the Institute of Jazz Studies, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections annual conference, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the Apollo Theater, the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and at the Westport Public Library in Westport, Connecticut. He is currently researching his next book, an interdisciplinary examination of the Hill District in Pittsburgh, PA. He is a 2015 Resident Artist at both Jentel Artist Residency Program in Sheridan, Wyoming and the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York. Weeks is a 2004 graduate of Rutgers University-Newark’s MFA Program in Jazz History and Research.
