Known as THE NOMAD JUNKIE due to his peripatetic lifestyle and artistic restlessness.DENNIS LEROY KANGALEE is a NYC-based writer/dramatist from Queens born to West Indian parents. He has led several lives & is constantly looking for meaning. Poet, performer, & dramatist he has been an Outsider Artist from the get go, choosing to do his "own thing" as opposed to being a part of the "Industry" -- sometimes to his own detriment.
Kangalee's writing is both political and personal. His poetry, stories, and plays reflect his own anger and frustration as he sees the world's injustice in an everyday observation.
Inspired by Protest Art, early punk & rap, revolutionary jazz, and Theater of the Absurd, Kangalee draws inspiration from his own life as as opposed to Literary History or knowledge of the classics. He writes for the little man caught in the snow and beneath the corporate avalanche, those who draw lines in the sand--the losers, the rebels, the tormented, and the romantic rovers hovering on the margins of the mainstream who dare to try to make sense of "life in society" and the doorway of 21st Century-Brave New World-ethos.
Initially an actor, he was expelled from Juilliard in 1997 (due to his insistence that he would host the very first Black American Theater Seminar in Lincoln Center with or without the support of his teachers!), and he became a maverick director amongst the New York indepedent off & off-off Broadway scene -- staging plays at the Ohio on Wooster street, Independent Art HERE, and the National Black Theater on 125th street-- before nearly losing himself to a catatonic state of depression and drug abuse with the turn of the new millennium. It was romantic love and a return to writing that later rehabilitated him. In a self imposed exile overseas, he began to write under an assumed moniker -- The Nomad Junkie -- giving birth to a prolific stream of work between 2005 and 2007 and the second phase of his life.
