Langston Hughes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Weekly 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!
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 1): “The Idea of Ancestry”
I know / their dark eyes, they know mine.
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Save 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…
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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.
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“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The New Yorker hosted a discussion about a previously unpublished Langston Hughes short story with Arnold Rampersand, who wrote a two-volume biography of the Harlem Renaissance poet, and first discovered the unpublished story thirty years ago.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,”…
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Black 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…
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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?”
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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.