From Black Speculative Arts Digital Archive 1. What was the inspiration for the creation of “MotherShip: MotherVerse”? “MotherShip:MotherVerse” was conceived as part of a public Afrofuturism exhibit entitled “The MotherShip Connection.” Poet, Community Builder and Afrofuturist Olu Butterfly conceived this idea and asked me to be one of her collaborators. This was an opportunity for us to mount an […]
I DIDN’T KNOW MUCH about Robert Irwin’s work when I wandered into the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden a few weeks ago. I knew that he was a contemporary of a few other artists I admire, James Turrell among them, and that he was the first artist to win a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1984, […]
THE BURDEN OF DIVERSITY Every year it was the same. The then Milwaukee Sentinel printed the pictures of all their summer interns who worked at the paper. The pictures were divided into two categories: Interns Minority Interns Each year, my picture, with the worst lighting imaginable, was displayed under the minority banner. I hated that […]
An interview with Andrew Mitchell Davenport In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Zora Neale Hurston writes, “If you have received no clear-cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes […]
From THE ESTABLISHMENT On The Unbearable Whiteness Of The Yale English Major On a sweltering morning in August 1989, I took an Amtrak train from my hometown in Jacksonville, Florida, to New Haven, Connecticut, to begin my freshman year at Yale. A first-generation black college student from a neighborhood where no one else I knew […]
Congratulations to Kimbilio Fellows Lesley Arimah (’15) and Tope Folarin (’15) for being nominated for the 2016 Caine Prize. The Caine Prize for African Writing is awarded annually to an African writer of a short story published in English. Tope won this award previously in 2013. At a ceremony in London on July 4th, South […]
For the Kimbilio panel at AWP ’16, Cole Lavalais (’13, ’15) presented these remarks on directionality in fiction: Several years ago during my first semester in graduate school, some of my classmates and I went out to a local watering hole after a rather tedious writing workshop. Which, by the way, was nothing new. I […]
