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 […]
Angela Flournoy wins VCU Cabell First Novelist Award for ‘The Turner House’ Angela Flournoy has won the 2016 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which honors an outstanding debut novel published during a calendar year. Her winning book, “The Turner House,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, tells the story of 13 adult siblings forced to reckon with their […]
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 […]
Returning Fellows Christi Cartwright (’13), Rosalyn Story (’13), and Andy Johnson (’14) will join the class of ’16 for the Annual Retreat in Taos. We asked our vets to offer some advice to our Newbie Kimbees. Christi Cartwright Says: Accept writing friendships and kindnesses from whomever/wherever they are given. Writing is a lonely venture and kindness helps […]
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 […]
by Michal B. Tager from What Weekly Khaliah Williams and I meet on the Avenue in Hampden, where many young, artistic folk have moved in the past ten years, transforming a bastion of the working-class into a new artistic Mecca of Baltimore. She is early for our meeting, highly polite and very well-coiffed; we both […]
Kimbilio Fellow Renee Simms (’13, ’15) anchored a panel at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles on the subject of black writers in a white world. JADED IBIS published an extended version of her introductory remarks. Where Writers of African Ancestry in America Find Themselves There has never been a consensus or even a plurality agreement […]
Glory By Lesley Nneka Arimah When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy, nor the weeks she would spend populating forms and submitting copies of her bills and driver’s license and the certificate that documented her birth on September 9, 1986, a rainy Tuesday, at 6:45 p.m., after […]
