Ravi will be a featured presenter at the Kimbilio/SMU Litfest Reading on October 15th. Save the date! The Burden of History: an Interview with Ravi Howard “Growing up in Montgomery, I heard stories about the Civil Rights Movement from people who never became famous. That experience had an impact on my storytelling.” by SEBASTIAN MATTHEWS […]
A RAMADAN TALE Near the end of the first day of my third Ramadan, Omar went to the store as the sun set and returned at the brink of the moon, bearing everything I requested except the dried fruit. I specifically said dried apricots and raisins. When he left I had just started to grow […]
UNGRATEFUL, UNAFRAID Joanne wore a pink circle skirt and a ribbon in her hair the day her sister disappeared. She was proud of that skirt, proud that it came all the way from the sixties, dusty but intact in a plastic bag from the attic—booty from a weekend of endlessly ungrateful household chores. Read the full story here: […]
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. […]
A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT When I asked an employee at a hotel in Richmond, Virginia for directions to the Museum of the Confederacy, he gave me a strange look. “Are you sure you want to go there?” I understood the skepticism of this African American man in his smart bellman’s uniform. Black folks generally tend to […]
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 […]
