Reinforcing the Resistance, Aiding the Anxious: Three Poetry Anthologies
Barbara Berman reviews three social justice oriented poetry anthologies today at The Rumpus.
...more
Posts Tagged: Langston Hughes
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Lola StVil
Lola StVil discusses her latest novel, Girls Like Me, how her characters demand to be written, what her family thinks of her writing career, and why representation is essential.
...more
On the Front Lines
When you pick up a pen instead of a rifle, you’re fighting an entirely different battle. This is my duty. This is my patriotism.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Joe Ide
Joe Ide discusses his debut novel, IQ his writing process, and why he enjoys fly fishing.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson discusses her latest novel Another Brooklyn, the little deaths of lost friendships, and her work with children across the country as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.
...more
Reimagining America
I’m a performer, and in hard times, this job gets harder. I make music when the nation mourns, and my music can sound like hope.
...more
Color at the Mercy of the Light
What if I said: while people still believe they are white in America, that delusion, and the dream upon which it is founded, needs to be seriously examined.
...more
America Again
I felt urgently that it was the moment to tell the story of what I’ve learned about American music—or maybe about being an American.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Love = addiction. And both hijack the brain’s learning circuit. Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, resurrected on YouTube. The top traits of bestselling books. (Hint: Not sex.) The language you speak affects your morality. Sand avalanche! In your brain!
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea of Ancestry”
I know / their dark eyes, they know mine.
...moreSave Langston Hughes’s Harlem Home
Award-winning author Renée Watson is fighting to save the house that Langston Hughes lived in through much of the 1950s and 60s, until his death in 1967, Heather Long reports for CNN. Watson launched an Indiegogo campaign to rescue the brownstone and preserve its literary history—donate here today to make sure we don’t lose this important piece of American […]
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new collection Insurrections, creating a fictional town, and the pressure to make religious decisions during puberty.
...more“Seven People Dancing”
The New Yorker hosted a discussion about a previously unpublished Langston Hughes short story with Arnold Rampersand, who wrote a two-volume biography of the Harlem Renaissance poet, and first discovered the unpublished story thirty years ago. The story, “Seven People Dancing,” explores themes of sexuality and expression: I think that his cruelly comic, or comically cruel, […]
...moreBlack and White Portraits from the Harlem Renaissance
Van Vechten took to Zora Neale Hurston and especially to Langston Hughes. Biographies tell us that Hughes didn’t doubt Van Vechten’s sincerity, but he worried nevertheless how their connection would look in Harlem. Countee Cullen would eventually sit for Van Vechten, but in the 1920s, as a young black poet who believed he could write […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: We Are Not Dead
“The wants and desires of dead people, the one’s they didn’t get to fulfill—that’s what slays me…What if they wanted more? What if they didn’t want to leave behind the things they left behind?”
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey: Chapter 10
Becoming a poet means locating what images and symbols, what argument and figuration, are best suited to convey the aspects of change you most want to reveal through your writing.
...moreStaving-off-Despair Roundup
When there’s an injustice as great a man walking free after killing an unarmed teenager, at least we have writing to turn to. Our essays editor Roxane Gay has done some of that writing for Salon in a piece about the George Zimmerman trial titled “Racism is every American’s problem.”An essay or an Op-Ed won’t solve anything,” […]
...moreThe Grand Gesture and Other Thoughts About Graduation
An HTMLGIANT/Rumpus Joint Publication
...more