literary
Angela Y. Davis is a scholar, teacher, activist, and organizer. She has published books on race, class, and gender, including Women, Race, and Class (1981); Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998); and Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003). She helped to popularize the notion of a “prison-industrial complex.” In 1969 she came to national attention […]
Featured image: Brandon Mushori/Wikimedia Commons Harare, Zimbabwe Farai is drinking Zambezi lager behind the wheel of an evergreen Acura at three o’clock in the morning. I’ve been in Harare less than a couple of hours. The sky is pitch, anticipating the day as a vision of itself rising up again. Meaning: somewhere over on the […]
Clyde Taylor, a scholar who in the 1970s and ’80s played a leading role in identifying, defining and elevating Black cinema as an art form, died on Jan. 24 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92. His daughter, Rahdi Taylor, a filmmaker, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As a young […]
Nearly two dozen authors and scholars will explore contemporary Black literature and African American literary history at the 40th annual Key West Literary Seminar on the continental United States’ southernmost island. The “Singing America: A Celebration of Black Literature” seminar began Thursday night with a keynote address on African American poetry by Kevin Young . […]
The U.S. Postal Service has used its collection of stamps to visually honor the legacies of pioneering individuals who are embedded in the fabric of American history. Among its 2023 compilation of prints are Black literary trailblazers Ernest J. Gaines and Toni Morrison. Both writers used their craft to amplify stories that provided a lens […]
September 20, 2022September 20, 2022 The Clemson University Department of English has started the year welcoming a new member in a brand-new faculty position: writer-in-residence. The first person to occupy this role is poet Desiree C. Bailey. “As the 2020 winner of the Yale Younger Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, […]
When I saw her again, she was working, as usual, telling me that writing was often a matter of plodding along. She talked about the joy of revision; she talked about the pain of revision, too, and said that anyone who couldn’t bring himself or herself to face it couldn’t be a real writer. “My […]
Given the vague definitions of child maltreatment and the discretion given to people who report, investigate, and respond to abuse and neglect allegations, it should come as no surprise that studies have discovered bias against Black families at every stage of decision making. Anti-Black discrimination is well documented in every other public system and private […]
The North Carolina writer Jason Mott has won the National Book Foundation’s 2021 prize for fiction, for his novel Hell of a Book. The US foundation’s 72nd annual awards, presented online only due to Covid-19, were announced on Wednesday night. The foundation described Mott’s book as a “masterful novel” that broke new ground: “A structurally […]
More than a fifth of the authors shortlisted for British literary prizes last year were black, a turnaround for an industry in which no black authors were shortlisted in four of the years between 1996 and 2009. In 1996, there was not a single black author shortlisted in prize shortlists analysed by the Guardian, but […]
-
Pages