Omar Luqmaan-Harris

Once he got to college, things really started looking up. He earned a paid internship with Pfizer Inc. as a sales rep in Detroit, MI. A year and a half later he beat out 80 or so students for a coveted international marketing internship to live and work in Sao Paulo Brazil for 16 months. While in school, he created two companies with the help of talented friends. The first was Force 5 International, a campus organization with the mission of increasing the marketability of FAMU’s students through international exposure. In his last year of college he joined forces with two other friends to launch Verde, a natural skin care company. Upon graduating with his MBA at 25, he joined Schering-Plough corporation as a management associate (their fast-track leadership program). Four years later he became the youngest marketing director in the company, and two years later at the age of 31 became the company’s youngest Senior Marketing Director ever.

But there was a flipside to Omar’s life, few people ever imagined. He returned to Tallahassee after 8 months in Detroit a changed man. Something had gotten into him and was lying in wait. Strange thoughts were filling his head in the quiet moments after midnight. Ideas were starting to take shape that scared the crap out of him. These ideas needed an outlet or they threatened to crack through his exterior veneer and shock the world. Omar needed to give these ideas a voice. One night it came to him. I’ll call him Qwantu Amaru – the lightbringer. A new persona was born.

Qwantu Amaru is now 11 years old. An avid reader, he aspires to write suspenseful page turners and socially significant literature like those of his writing influences Richard Wright, Harper Lee, Walter Mosley, Tananarive Due and Stephen King. Qwantu draws his inspiration from his modest upbringing in small towns and cities across Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Florida. In addition to his first novel, ONE BLOOD, Qwantu has written five volumes of poetry: Lightbringer, Lovelost, After the Storm, Midnight’s Shadow, and Awakening. His poetry blog at myspace has received over 7,000 readers. His author blog The Peak Experience has over 1,000 readers. Qwantu is an active member of the outstanding socially active poetry collective Black on Black Rhyme out of Tallahassee, FL. He has performed spoken word in poetry venues from New York to Los Angeles. For more information visit the Black on Black Rhyme website or e-mail him at qwantu@hotmail.com.

Omar and Qwantu currently reside in Jersey City, NJ.

1998

I’m a Junior at Florida A&M University, in my third year of business school, when I learn that I will be moving to Detroit, MI for an internship in the Sales Division at a major pharmaceutical company. I’m leaving the sleepy confines of Tallahassee, FL for the hustle of the Motor City, and it couldn’t have happened at a better moment.

I’m 20 years old and have recently experienced a flurry of failed relationships. Five girlfriends in five months. Serial monogamy at its finest. I sure know how to pick them, too. Leave the well-adjusted girls to the losers, give me the fixer-uppers. I honestly believe that I’m some sort of Prince Charming that can heal any woman’s heart. I don’t understand why I need to do this or even what makes me think that I’m capable, but this has become an emerging pattern.

I’m also a hopeless romantic. I only just recently lost my virginity (not that virginity and romance are mutually exclusive), not necessarily in the way I had imagined it. I really believed that I would hold out until I was in love, but it was not to be. In the end I succumbed to pressure from an ex-girlfriend who I had learned some of the sexual ropes from my freshman year. Years later I would write a poem called The First Time about this experience.

Two months later I’m dating a girl I never believed I’d have a chance with, and because of this fact, and because of the fact that I’m working 40 hours a week, going to classes, and having bunny rabbit sex (but where’s the love?), I haven’t noticed that she has basically moved out of her dorm and into my apartment. This fact dawns on me one morning as I tug furiously at lost strands of her curly black hair stuck in the drain of the shower that I share with my roommate. How did this happen, I wonder? Less than a week later we’ve broken up. This decision was influenced by my need for a break from her possessiveness, and the fact that I had a passionate interlude with my downstairs neighbor and best female friend.

Me and the best friend consummate the relationship shortly thereafter, a choice that will doom our friendship for the next sixteen months or so. We are broken up by a third friend who puts a wedge between us that won’t be removed for some time.

And then I meet the woman who will change my life. Let’s call her the Scorpion Queen. SQ was a goddess: sexy, worldly, experienced, and crazy as a loon.

I was sprung.

We start officially dating during Spring Break of 1997 and after two suicide attempts (hers not mine), a major betrayal (hers not mine), a faked pregnancy, and one fight too many, all in the space of eight months, I’ve had enough. The aforementioned internship gets me out of the city just in the nick of time. But the whirlwind of the previous 16 months is still weighing heavily.

This becomes very clear to me one night in January of 1998. I’m in the hotel room of a fellow representative in training in the company’s regional office near Chicago, and I’m basically telling this very attractive woman who I really like, my life story. We talk all night, from 8 pm to 8 am. A night like this had never happened to me before and will never happen again. This is the night that my life changed in a fundamental way that I will only come to terms with much later.

My bleeding heart interprets this event as a sign. She must be THE ONE. Training ends and we go back to our respective cities for a month before returning to the training center. Attempts at connecting with my special friend are rebuked, and I’m left feeling grossly unsatisfied with the situation. I return to the training class, eager to see her, but she spends the week ignoring me. On a flight to New York for the culmination of the training, I can’t sleep, so I pull out my agenda and write the first real poem I’ve ever written. I type up the poem as soon as I get to the hotel and send it to her via e-mail. I check my e-mail religiously in the coming days, eagerly awaiting her response. Nothing. I’m chock full of nervous energy without an appropriate escape valve. Then, suddenly a few days later, in the midst of the training meeting, I begin to write. Poem after poem flows out of me. In the beginning, the words are directed squarely in her direction (with titles like: Dazed and Confused), but soon, I’m writing about any and everything. I leave the training meeting without closure, but having gained this precious ability of self-expression that has been missing my whole life.

And to my even greater surprise, the poems don’t suck. When I begin the most healing relationship of my twenties by reconnecting with my high school sweetheart, my words become the tapestry of our two year love affair. Beginning with one of my favorite pieces, My Rose to Withering Rose, and finally, sadly, Winter in the Garden, the story is poetically revealed, and the circle is closed.

Over the next nine years, I will go on to write hundreds of poems in a hundred different forms about hundreds of subjects, join the world’s largest poetry troupe: Black on Black Rhyme, and perform on stages from Tallahassee, FL to Los Angeles, CA to Brooklyn, NY.

My poetry became the foundation for the type of novels I would write: unflinchingly honest, masterfully suspenseful, and terribly entertaining.

I started writing my first horror novel One Blood in January 2000 while living in Tallahassee, FL. At the time I was a full time student pursuing my MBA, so you can imagine how much writing I got done. The novel traveled with me from Tallahassee to Brazil, back to Tallahassee, to Philadelphia, PA to Yardley, PA , to Woodbridge, NJ, back to Brazil, and back to NJ and went with me on vacations all over the world. Definitely the longest relationship I’ve ever had in my life; don’t know whether that‘s a good thing or not, lol.

I finished the first draft in a lightning fast six and a half years, and two months later I had a cosmically aligned meeting with Stephanie Casher at the Black Writers Reunion and Conference in Dallas, TX. Because of Stephanie’s editing skills, I was able to refine the book from 164,000 unpublishable words down to 93,000 impactful words while collecting nearly 20 rejections from literary agents. Along the way I met James Lewis and the Pantheon circle was complete.

Even though I’ve completed a novel, I must admit that I’ve never felt much like a “real” writer. Writing for me has always been the other thing that I do. The other side of the slash e.g. student/writer or marketer/writer. I often wondered if, to be published, I would have to eradicate the left side of the slash…

But that’s where Pantheon comes in. By joining forces with Stephanie and James, I may still get to have my cake and eat it too. Run the day to day operations of our business, while still maintaining my writing life.

Like Batman, I have a highly successful alter ego – he’s Bruce Wayne, I’m Omar Luqmaan-Harris. And like him, I created an alter ego which allows me to do the work I was put here on this planet to do. Hence Qwantu Amaru. I was reading an article in GQ about Christian Bale and he said something that really resonated with me about Batman director/screenwriter Christopher Nolan. He said, “Chris was the first director of this franchise who understood that Bruce Wayne was the mask.” Right on. Or should I say, write on!