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What Makes America a Nation? (And If It Isn’t, What Could?)
After exiling himself in Paris to escape the American prison house of race, James Baldwin wrote, I proved, to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I. And I found my experience was shared...
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On the Power of the “Unlinked” Story Collection
When I first queried agents about my story collection, I heard this a lot: “These stories are good, but can you link them through a character or a town so I’ll have half a chance at selling this as a...
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Reading is a Political Encounter: On Violence, Language, and Selective...
History class, Tehran, 1994: Our teacher, a devout woman with a white diamond-shaped face framed by a black hijab, asked us to transcribe in our notebooks the heroic story of Ruholla Khomeini’s rise to...
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How Richard Wright Grappled with Behaviorism, Racism, and Trauma in Native Son
John Watson, one of pioneering psychologists behind behaviorism, confused the limits of what was observable with the limits of what was real, but in all the excitement, few noticed. In the 1920s and...
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Big Town, Insistent Revolutions: On the Rich, Kaleidoscopic Lives of New...
“He entered the park at the North Gate and swallowed mouthfuls of the heavy shade that curtained its arch. He walked into the shadow of a lamp-post that lay on the path like a spear. It pierced him...
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The Miracle of Black Love: On the Greater Meaning of My Parents’ Enduring...
In my family and community, my parents’ love story was legendary. Recounting elements of it, tellers of the tale—aunts and uncles, cousins and neighbors, friends and casual observers—all seemed to...
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Myriam J.A. Chancy on Writing Haiti and Honoring Its Local Realities
This tumultuous past year and a half has been a mixed time for Myriam J.A. Chancy, whose new novel, What Storm, What Thunder, is published today: “I’ve been lucky in the sense that I have been with my...
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How the TV Adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots Sparked a Cultural Awakening
A good many Blacks of Ithaca, New York, in the 1920s worked as domestic servants in the fraternity houses near Cornell University. When those Black citizens sought news about other Blacks, they often...
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Kyle Lucia Wu on James Baldwin, Qiu Miaojin, and Brandon Taylor
Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them. This week, we spoke to the author of Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu. * Book Marks: First...
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Why Writers Shouldn’t Wait for Permission to Create the Stories They Want
I’ve never really understood the idea of writers, especially women and minority writers, waiting for “permission” to write what we want, when we want. How did the process of regurgitating terrible...
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WATCH: Myisha Cherry and Jacqueline Woodson Discuss the Liberatory...
In her new book, The Case for Rage, philosopher Myisha Cherry turns popular prejudices about anger on their head and argues for anger’s utility—and importance—in the fight against injustice. Anger has...
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Charles J. Shields on the Profound and Playful Friendship Between Lorraine...
During that year of intense writing and rewriting, Hansberry became friends with James Baldwin. They met in April, at a workshop reading at the Actors Studio of his novel Giovanni’s Room, which he had...
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On Clarence Major’s Enduring Portrait of the Blues, Dirty Bird Blues
Clarence Major knows and feels the blues, and his protagonist in Dirty Bird Blues, Manfred Banks, better known as Man, is a folk poet and singer who measures the heart line with a humbling down-home...
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Kiese Laymon on Revision as Love, and Love as Revision
This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted...
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Censoring the American Canon: Farah Jasmine Griffin on Book Bans Targeting...
Acclaimed writer and professor Farah Jasmine Griffin joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about why book bans so often target the power of Black literature. Griffin discusses...
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Why, and How, We Form Beliefs: A Reading List
Belief is a bond, a wish, a meaning-making magic that closes the gap between the world as it is and the world as we hope it could be. I spent deep time over the last four years immersed in the lives of...
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Mapping the Unknown: Literary Defamiliarization in Our Pandemic Era
In 1917, a peculiar essay on the aims of art—and how we should talk about it—appeared in Russia. If the year would soon be remembered for bloody political revolutions, the essay, which had been written...
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How Baldwin and Jenkins Capture Communal Black Love in If Beale Street Could...
Welcome to Open Form, a weekly film podcast hosted by award-winning writer Mychal Denzel Smith. Each week, a different author chooses a movie: a movie they love, a movie they hate, a movie they hate to...
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Blacks and Jews: Fifty-Five Years After James Baldwin’s “Negroes Are...
James Baldwin’s landmark essay “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White” is alternatively nuanced and strident, exacting and scattershot, hopeful and fatalistic. It’s fairly prophetic too....
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“James Baldwin writes down to nobody.” Read Langston Hughes’ 1958 Review of...
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all. * “I think that one definition of the great artist might be the creator who...
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