Touré, Kolo Toure

Touré (March 20, 1971) is an American novelist, music journalist, cultural critic, and television personality based in New York City. He is the host of Fuse TV's Hiphop Shop and On The Record. He is also a contributor to MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show. He also on the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame Nominating Committee.

Touré was given his name by his mother after she read an article in Time Magazine about then-President of Guinea Sekou Touré. In 1989, Touré graduated from Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. On March 19, 2005, he married Rita Nakouzi on a beach in Miami, with Rev. Run from Run-DMC as the officiant and Nelson George as the best man. Touré and his wife live in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. They have a son named Hendrix and a daughter named Fairuz.

In 1992, his junior year at Emory University, Touré dropped out of college and became an intern at Rolling Stone. He was fired after a few months but weeks later was asked to write record reviews and then feature stories.

In 1996, upset that a feature story he'd written for The New Yorker was rejected, he enrolled in the graduate school for creative writing at Columbia University. He took a fiction writing class and wrote a story about a black saxophonist in Harlem named Sugar Lips Shinehot who loses the ability to see white people. The story was called "The Sad Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and the Portable Promised Land". The second story he wrote, about a dangerously sexual preacher, was called "A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls and the Spectacular Final Sunday Sermon of the Right Revren Daddy Love". After it won an award from the magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, he embarked on a fiction writing career.