M.K. Asante Jr., 24, was already an award-winning film producer, author, journalist and poet. Now he is also a professor of creative writing, screenwriting and African-American cinema at Morgan State University.

Asante ’s award-winning documentary “500 Years Later,” a retrospective of the African Diaspora, and the book of poetry “Like Water Running Off My Back,” has afforded the young artist an opportunity to join Morgan’s English and Language Arts department beginning in fall 2006. Asante is working alongside chair Dolan Hubbard, who has expanded the department’s “multi-genre approach” by incorporating screenwriting, journalism and literature into a new “English for the 21st Century” heading.

Hubbard said Asante, will also teach a spring “360 degrees of Blackness” class, encapsulating the Black experience in a myriad of woven stories expressed through poetry, film and other written or visual art forms.

“He represents the blend of the hip-hop generation combined with a tremendous understanding of the Black Diaspora. He would challenge our students to climb every mountain because he stands on top of the mountain as a sign and symbol of what they can accomplish,” Hubbard said.

Asante, son of Temple University’s professor Molefi Kete Asante, creator of the Afrocentricity movement, and dance scholar Kariamu Welsh, plans to give students a perspective of movie making and storyboarding that will “demystify the film industry so that we can begin to create our own images and tell stories from our perspective,” he said.

After wining the 2005 Pan African Film Festival held in Los Angeles for “500 Years Later,” Asante published two poetry books, “Like Water Running Off My Back” in 2002 and “Beautiful And Ugly Too,” released in 2005. He recently completed a film on Kwanzaa narrated by and co-written Maya Angelou, a renowned poet laureate and the first lifetime Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. The project represents what Asante insists is “really about the best of what it means to be Black.”

Asante spent most of his life in Philadelphia and knows the challenges faced by young males coming of age in the inner city. He was kicked out of school in eighth grade for writing graffiti on walls and his parents placed him in a private school.

“During that period of time, I really was rebelling against pretty much everything. I was skipping school, hanging out, not doing the right thing,” he said. “They (his parents) were telling me all the right things, but I just wasn’t listening.”

One warning pierced reality, “if you continue living this way, you will end up in jail or dead,” his parents said.

“That wasn’t just talk when they were saying that,” Asante said. “My brother was in jail at that point. When they said you’ll end up in jail, it resonated.”

Visiting his brother, Daudi Jackson, who was jailed for a probation violation, was a major wake-up call in Asante’s life. “The disheveled appearance and depression” of a brother who “was always the smartest individual I had ever known, in terms of the pure brilliance and genius of his mind” was overwhelming.

Asante recently graduated from the UCLA School of Film and Television with a master’s degree in screenwriting after completing undergraduate work at Lafayette University and the University of London.