How a journalist found her voice as her mother lost hers.
Toni Morrison
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Culture, Essays & Criticism, Feature, profile, Story, Writing
Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes: On Novelist Nettie Jones and the Madness of ‘Fish Tales’
Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.
Posted inNonfiction
‘People Can Become Houses’
In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Culture, Current Events, Reading List
Toni Morrison, 1931-2019
An elegy and reading list for Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who died Monday, August 5, 2019.
Posted inCommentary, Nonfiction, Uncategorized
James Baldwin and the Lost Giovanni’s Room Screenplay
In 1978, James Baldwin began working on a screenplay for Giovanni’s Room, his most beloved work. For the past forty years, though, the script has been shelved in a London flat.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Story, Writing
The Writer Alone
A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. This, I believed, was the optimal, and probably only, condition under which art could be made.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
To Post, or Not to Post?
Eloghosa Osunde contemplates the role of marginalized artists in online activism.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
To Post, or Not to Post?
Eloghosa Osunde contemplates the role of marginalized artists in online activism.
Posted inArts & Culture, Reading List, Unapologetic Women
The Mastery and Magic of Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
With her profiles of Toni Morrison, Dave Chapelle, James Baldwin, and more, Ghansah is an unparalleled chronicler of black excellence.
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison
INTERVIEWER You mentioned getting permission to write. Who gave it to you? MORRISON No one. What I needed permission to do was to succeed at it. I never signed a contract until the book was finished because I didn’t want it to be homework. A contract meant somebody was waiting for it, that I had […]