What to Read When You Want to Celebrate the Harlem Renaissance
Kimberly Garrett Brown shares a reading list to celebrate CORA’S KITCHEN.
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Join NOW!Kimberly Garrett Brown shares a reading list to celebrate CORA’S KITCHEN.
...moreJoe Okonkwo shares a reading list to celebrate KISS THE SCARS ON THE BACK OF MY NECK.
...moreKelly Harris-DeBerry discusses her debut poetry collection, FREEDOM KNOWS MY NAME.
...moreErin Hensley and Julia Callahan share a reading list to celebrate I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.
...moreMorgan Jerkins discusses her new book, WANDERING IN STRANGE LANDS.
...more“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
...moreEve L. Ewing discusses her new collection, 1919.
...moreLangston, I am finally at the table, eating with everyone.
...moreBarbara Berman reviews three social justice oriented poetry anthologies today at The Rumpus.
...moreLola 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.
...moreWhen you pick up a pen instead of a rifle, you’re fighting an entirely different battle. This is my duty. This is my patriotism.
...moreJoe Ide discusses his debut novel, IQ his writing process, and why he enjoys fly fishing.
...moreJacqueline 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.
...moreI’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.
...moreWhat 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.
...moreI 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.
...moreLove = 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!
...moreI know / their dark eyes, they know mine.
...moreAward-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 […]
...moreRion Amilcar Scott discusses his new collection Insurrections, creating a fictional town, and the pressure to make religious decisions during puberty.
...moreThe 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, […]
...moreVan 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 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?”
...moreBecoming 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.
...moreWhen 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,” […]
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