STATEWIDE – This week, NJN’s State of the Arts looks at four artists who are Crossing Over: a reporter who writes poetry, a jazz musician who paints, a WWII transvestite, and artists who go commercial. Crossing Over airs on Friday, October 12 at 8:30 pm, with a rebroadcast on Wednesday, October 17 at 11:30 pm. State of the Arts marks twenty-five years on NJN this year. The series has earned 28 Regional Emmy Awards, including New York Emmy Awards in 2007 and 2005, and Mid-Atlantic Emmys in 2007 and 2006. Crossing Over was nominated for a 2007 Mid-Atlantic Emmy in the category of Outstanding Arts Program.

• Oliver Lake
Alto saxophonist Oliver Lake is known for his expansive and creative musical vision: a co-founder of the World Saxophone Quartet, he also heads a jazz trio, a quartet, a big band, and has recorded with musicians as diverse as a steel drummer and a Navajo flautist. He’s also a published poet, a painter, and a performance artist who stars in his own one-man shows. Lake says it’s his sense of curiosity that drives his constant experimentation. He traces his history of “crossing over” artistic boundaries to his early involvement with the Black Artists Group (BAG) in St. Louis in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. State of the Arts producer Susan Wallner visited Lake in performance with his “Trio 3” at the Sweet Rhythm club in Greenwich Village, and at his home in Montclair, New Jersey.

• David Tucker
Poet David Tucker is a deputy managing editor of The Star-Ledger newspaper in Newark, New Jersey, and was part of the team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of Governor James E. McGreevey's resignation and the scandal surrounding it. He’s also a poet, and has recently published a collection of his poems called “Late For Work.” State of the Arts producer Christopher Benincasa followed Tucker as he made his rounds in the newsroom, and caught him reading his poetry before live audiences at the 11th Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at Waterloo Village. Tucker is used to people doing a double take when they learn that he “crosses over” to write poetry, but, as he likes to point out, Walt Whitman was a journalist, too.