Silence Is the Fertile Field: Talking with Fenton Johnson
Fenton Johnson discusses his new book, AT THE CENTER OF ALL BEAUTY.
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Posts Tagged: zora neale hurston
What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Women’s History
Rumpus editors share their favorite writing that speaks to women’s history past, present, and future.
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Praise the Bottom: A Conversation with Malcolm Tariq
Malcolm Tariq discusses his debut poetry collection, HEED THE HOLLOW.
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A Storm Underneath: Talking with Shonda Buchanan
Shonda Buchanan discusses her new memoir, BLACK INDIAN.
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Uncomfortable Truths: The Twenty-Ninth Year by Hala Alyan
Making it to thirty seems unimaginable, yet it happens anyway.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #193: C.J. Farley
“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
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Music and Spirituality: A Conversation with Marcia Douglas
Marcia Douglas discusses her forthcoming novel, THE MARVELLOUS EQUATIONS OF THE DREAD.
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Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
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What to Read When You’re Thinking about Florida
In celebration of our Floridian friends and family, we’ve compiled a list of great books that take place in, engage with, or otherwise visit the “Sunshine state.”
...moreNotable Portland: 5/11–5/17
Thursday 5/11: The Writers in the Schools program at Grant High School hosts a student reading to share their semester of work. Broadway Books, 7 p.m., free. Jeff VanderMeer, author of Southern Reach Trilogy, reads from his new book, Borne, a story about two humans and two creatures. VanderMeer will be joined in conversation by […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tara Betts
Tara 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.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: No Wound
Maybe I can touch it and show it to you. If I convince you, we can call it real. And then perhaps it will be.
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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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The Conversation: Angel Nafis, Safia Elhillo, and Elizabeth Acevedo
I don’t think it ever fully sunk in for me that I even live in America.
...moreWomen Writers Lost and Found
Henry James found in the stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson “a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.” There’s a roll call of rediscovered and canonical women writers at Salon. From Clarice Lispector and Lucia Berlin, to Zora Neale […]
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #22: Classic Novels That Are a Joy to Read
Sometimes we bypass the classic novels on the way to the rich offering of current literary fiction. Fair enough; there is so much to love in today’s fiction. But once in a while, dust off a classic gem and consider the language, the depth, the metaphorical heft these books carry—along with being engrossing, powerful reads. Reading […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Josie Pickens
Josie Pickens talks about building relationships through blogging, changing the narrative around black women in America, and eradicating silence through storytelling.
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The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
...more(Don’t) Stick To What You Know
At the Atlantic, Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, discusses her struggle with writing about Detroit without having lived there, and how Zora Neale Hurston’s work helped her give herself permission to write outside her own experiences: It’s not about having a background that lines up with the characters you’re writing about, I realized. […]
...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 […]
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