The Rumpus Interview with Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau discusses her essay, “Know Your Rights!” from the collection, The Fire This Time, what she loves about motherhood, and why it’s time for White America to get uncomfortable.
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Posts Tagged: rachel kaadzi ghansah
The Conversation: Jayson Smith and A. H. Jerriod Avant
My responsibility is to not be negligent and cause unnecessary harm. To a listener or reader. My allegiance is only to truth.
...moreA Portable James Baldwin
I came to her place to take a picture of Baldwin’s typewriter. This is what I told her. But I think I also came because I wanted to see someone who is his flesh and blood. I wanted to see that he was really theirs, their Uncle Jimmy. Because if he was theirs, the logic […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Daniel José Older
Author Daniel José Older talks about his new novel, Shadowshaper, noir influence in urban fantasy, gentrification, white privilege and the publishing industry, and why we need diverse books, now more than ever.
...moreRiding With the Queen
Over at the New York Times, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah profiles Toni Morrison in a tremendous essay: Morrison is a woman of guardrails and many boundaries; she keeps them up in order to do the work. The work “protects,” she told me. “It’s a serious protection: emotionally, even intellectually, from the world.” Journalists from Europe and […]
...moreThe Wind Cries Mary
Last week we highlighted Rachel Kaadzhi Ghansah’s piece, “A River Runs Through It,” over at The Believer. Now, she shares a playlist of tunes, recorded at Electric Lady Studios, to accompany the original article: “They all have one thing in common, and I say this often, across forms, decades, they all evidence the certain qualities of innovative genius, bittersweetness, […]
...moreVoodoo Chile
A decade ago, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah stopped by Electric Lady Studios; ten years later, she’s writing about it for The Believer: Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even, when one gets a chance to go inside. There is something about Electric Lady that feels sacrosanct. From the moment the discreet, glass-paned […]
...moreDe origine actibusque aequationis
So: a train races beneath the city, having been made into a vehicle of war, covered with signatures and symbols, it goes crosstown, downtown, taking with it the story of dystopia and crack cocaine, “armamentation,” and innovation as it travels. This is what myths do: they tell us how things came to be. And all […]
...moreSearching for Dave Chappelle
“To turn his back on Hollywood, to walk away from the spotlight because it was turning him into a man he didn’t want to be—a man without dignity—was a move that was, in a way, Chappelle’s birthright, his own unwieldy kind of Negritude.” Featured in this month’s Believer is Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah’s essay on the […]
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