What to Read When You Don’t Know You’re a Poet
Kendra Allen shares a reading list to celebrate THE COLLECTION PLATE.
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Join NOW!Kendra Allen shares a reading list to celebrate THE COLLECTION PLATE.
...more[W]hat was going wrong? Why were our stories not being written or published?
...moreShonda Buchanan discusses her new memoir, BLACK INDIAN.
...moreThe poems of Ridiculous Light are wary of hope yet keep thrumming toward it.
...moreKendra Allen shares a reading list to celebrate her debut essay collection, WHEN YOU LEARN THE ALPHABET.
...moreTerry H. Watkins shares a list of books to celebrate her novel, DARLING GIRL.
...moreNana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah discusses FRIDAY BLACK.
...more“I understood in that moment that my life had changed forever. And it has.”
...moreHanif Abdurraqib discusses They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, honoring survival by showing up, and refusing to be governed by genre.
...moreAuthors whose works have been challenged or banned give recommendations on other “uncomfortable” books that will make you a better person for having read them.
...moreA 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.
...moreBonnie 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.
...moreTara 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.
...moreMicah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel.
...moreBrit Bennett discusses her debut novel The Mothers, investigating “what-if” moments, and navigating racism in white spaces.
...moreThe 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 […]
...moreNone of the imagery of Lemonade is foreign to those of us who grew up in the South or who have Southern roots.
...moreFrom 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 […]
...moreSari 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.
...moreThis 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 […]
...moreGuernica 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 […]
...moreThis 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 […]
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