What to Read When You’re Afraid of Growing Up
Kendra Allen shares a reading list to celebrate her debut essay collection, WHEN YOU LEARN THE ALPHABET.
...more
Posts Tagged: Alice Walker
What to Read When Trying to Figure Out Who You Are
Terry H. Watkins shares a list of books to celebrate her novel, DARLING GIRL.
...more
Writing in Earnest: Talking with Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah discusses FRIDAY BLACK.
...more
One Burning Question: A Conversation with Evelyn C. White
“I understood in that moment that my life had changed forever. And it has.”
...more
Carving Out Enough Space on the Cloud: Talking with Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib discusses They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, honoring survival by showing up, and refusing to be governed by genre.
...more
What to Read When You Want to Read an “Uncomfortable” Book
Authors whose works have been challenged or banned give recommendations on other “uncomfortable” books that will make you a better person for having read them.
...more
What to Read When Everyone Is Talking about Rape
A list of memoirs, fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction that deal with rape culture and the many ways that is shapes our society and the women and men who live within it.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell
Bonnie Jo Campbell discusses her collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, the natural world as a character, and finding writing from the male point of view easier.
...more
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tara Betts
Tara Betts discusses her newest collection, Break the Habit, the burden placed on black women artists to be both artist and activist, and why writing is rooted in identity.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks
Micah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett discusses her debut novel The Mothers, investigating “what-if” moments, and navigating racism in white spaces.
...moreThe Popular Vote
The Library of Congress recently polled American citizens to find out what books had the most profound effect on them. Among the 17,000-plus survey respondents, popular answers were books like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s The Stand, and The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. While some literary greats like Toni Morrison did not appear on […]
...more
Southern Girl: Beyoncé, Badu, and Southern Black Womanhood
None of the imagery of Lemonade is foreign to those of us who grew up in the South or who have Southern roots.
...moreThe Whiteness of Literary Landmarks
From Alice Walker: Standing there knocking on Flannery O’Connor’s door, I do not think of her illness; her magnificent work in spite of it; I think: It all comes back to houses. Of all the preserved writers’ houses of the world, there are only four belonging to people of color that are open to the […]
...more
Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me: Rebecca Walker
Sari Botton and Rebecca Walker talk about the challenges of writing about parents, becoming estranged from them, and then moving together past estrangement, to eventually heal the rift.
...moreSome Queer Writers of Color
This dovetails nicely with Roxane Gay’s post about writers of color: a list of writers of color who are also queer. “I thought, I’m sure I can come up with 50 books by LGBT people of color,” writes the post’s author. “So I did.” That list ranges from literary giants like James Baldwin and Alice Walker […]
...moreAlice Walker on Censorship
Guernica interviews Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple and one of the most censored contemporary writers, in honor of Banned Books Week. The Color Purple has been voted off school curriculums and out of school libraries many times since its publication in the early 1980s. Many more of her short stories and essays that […]
...moreNotable New York, This Week 4/12 – 4/18
This week in New York The Future of Criticism with Lorin Stein and Maud Newton, John D’Agata and Thalia Field discuss the lyric essay, Alice Walker on activism, Salman Rushdie and Lee Bollinger discuss free speech in a globalized world, Mikael Kennedy shows his Polaroids at the Chelsea Hotel and Congress for Curious People symposium […]
...more