MILK TEETH So now she knew and it was done, and as the curves in the road rocked her in and out of the same bad dream she thought of him: of how rough he’d been with the woman at the wedding, of how surprised he’d been to see her, and then less so, and then resigned. […]
In 2011, Washington writer Dolen Perkins-Valdez published “Wench,” an unsparing look at the brutal relationships between Southern plantation owners and the slaves they kept as mistresses. She captured the horrific treatment of these women even as they attempted to maintain their dignity. And now, in her second novel, “Balm,” she tells an equally moving story […]
“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1858 speech presaging the Civil War. Such a house sits at the heart of Mat Johnson’s ribald, incisive novel “Loving Day.” Bequeathed to the narrator, Warren Duffy, by his deceased father, it’s a roofless, ramshackle mansion in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia: “I […]
Dolen Perkins-Valdez wants to change readers’ perspective on the Civil War. Her best-selling debut novel, Wench, explored the lives of slave women — not on Southern plantations, but in a resort for slaveowners’ mistresses in Ohio. Her new book, Balm, is set in the post-war period, and it’s also in an unexpected […]
Paradox Lana closed the bedroom door firmly behind her, but it didn’t block out their noise. Even in the elusive moments when screams and screeches and sobbing stopped bouncing off of every solid surface, the reverberation remained. No stranger to self-sacrifice, Lana had done what she was expected to do, until, of course, she discovered […]
This week we’re celebrating the publication of novels by Kimbilio Faculty Members Mat Johnson and Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Here’s an article by Mat from BuzzFeed: Yo, I’m a mulatto. And I have to tell you, it’s great. I was black for most of my life, which is also great, but the thing is I look white […]
Recently, BOMB Magazine published a chapter that had been excised from Kimbilio Faculty Member Jeffrey Renard Allen’s SONG OF THE SHANK. Making Tom (Return): Behind the Scenes by Jeffery Renard Allen He is Tom at the same time that he is too preposterous to be Tom. (Root distinction, difference: Juluster is a rare one, but […]
Today we welcome the long anticipated 2nd novel from Kimbilio faculty member Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly says: The elegantly crafted second novel from Perkins-Valdez (after Wench) captures the fierce energy, diversity, and suffering of Civil War–era Chicago. At its heart are three strangers—two black, one white—whose lives intersect after each arrives in their […]
Kimbilio Faculty Member Mat Johnson’s new novel is published this week. Read Mat’s essay in the New York Times on PROVING MY BLACKNESS: I grew up a black boy who looked like a white one. My parents divorced when I was 4, and I was raised mostly by my black mom, in a black neighborhood […]
