202 Checkmates by Rion Amilcar Scott (from the collection Insurrections) In my eleventh year, my father taught me defeat. I sat with my back pressed on that old, scratchy brown couch. Tom chased Jerry across the television screen and then the image dissolved into a white dot in the center. I turned to see my […]
From A PUBLIC SPACE …I tell you this longish anecdote as a way to prepare you for what I see as the magic in Jamel Brinkley’s stories. These stories deal in large-scale deceit and betrayal, there are painful things at work in this fiction, but much like the scene I described above, Jamel Brinkley regularly […]
(Note: KIMBILIO thanks Julia for her ongoing service to our community. Since 2014, she has graciously volunteered to prepare manuscript material for our retreat.) Andrea Lee writes the kind of dazzling, lyrical prose that delights with its boldness—over three acclaimed novels, a New York Times Notable short story collection, and many essays and articles in publications […]
From the Evanston Public Library Blog: Amina Gautier writes short stories, and her short story collections win awards. It’s about that simple. Back in 2011, for instance, her debut collectionAt-Risk earned the Flannery O’Connor Award and the First Horizon Award among other honors, and her 2014 follow-upNow We Will Be Happy won the Praire Schooner […]
THE BEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING from RIPEN THE PAGE LITERARY MAGAZINE I am a poet and public interest advocate (lawyer, and now clinical professor of law). Everyday, I work with words, on the page, and as poets like to say – the stage, in order to impart some truth about the lives we lead and […]
Sex Coffee by Desiree Cooper You walk into the coffeehouse and pick a seat beside the thin woman whose beauty is coiled into tight vines of hair. Never seen her here before, you think as you slide into the bench beside her, careful not to get caught looking in her direction. You take off your […]
In Cole Lavalais’ debut novel Summer of the Cicadas, Viola “Vi” Moon hopes to leave her experience at a mental health facility behind when she enrolls in a small black college in the south, but the stability she hoped she’d gain fractures more quickly than she anticipated. Vi thinks the best way to regain her […]
http://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-saturday-rumpus-interview-darryl-pinckney/
A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Detroit community activist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging […]
