Millions of Tiny Things When Hammond was very young, he had a hard time sleeping. It felt as though there were millions of tiny things crawling around beneath his skin, and the small, small spaces that separated each of these tiny things was known to him, and so it wasn’t just that there were millions […]
We have learned of the passing of one of the leading lights in the African American literary community. Gloria Naylor inspired generations of writers, including many of our Kimbilio Fellows. Celebrate her life by grabbing your favorite Gloria Naylor novel from the shelf and remembering all she taught us. Ebony.com confirmed her passing and published a […]
When a Character Returns Edward P. Jones connected recurring characters through his short stories, providing a blueprint for one writer. From Catapult Woodrow and Rita Cunningham’s fifteen-year-old daughter Elaine left home after arguing with her father about the boys she entertained in the house while her parents were away. I turned the pages of “A […]
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 […]
Colson Whitehead made his debut in 1999 with the publication of his first novel The Intuitionist. At the time, the country was in the middle of a Y2K meltdown, Whitehead introduced us to Lila Mae Watson, a black, female elevator inspector under investigation after one of the lifts she inspected has failed. Lila Mae, a […]
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 […]
Cole Lavalais’s arresting debut novel, The Summer of the Cicadas, engages with a mother-daughter relationship, mental health, and first love, set on the campus of small black college in the South. The novel’s main character Viola (Vi) Moon is still emotionally fragile after a recent hospitalization at a mental health facility, but she’s also determined […]
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 […]
