Sanderia Faye (’13) nominee in Debut Fiction for MOURNER’S BENCH Naomi Jackson (faculty ’17) nominee in Debut Fiction for THE STAR SIDE OF BIRD HILL Angela Flournoy (faculty ’15) nominee in Fiction for THE TURNER HOUSE The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award TM honors the best in Black literature in the United States and around the globe. […]
Finding Michelle Kwan: A Black Boy’s Childhood on Ice By Dennis Norris II Long before it actually happened, I tried to tell the world that I was a figure skater. I tried on Saturday afternoons, back in the nineties when skating was on TV every weekend. I tried by pushing all the furniture to the edges […]
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 […]
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 […]
Sex Coffee by Desiree Cooper You walk into the coffeehouse and pick a seat beside the thin woman whose beauty is coiled into tight vines of hair. Never seen her here before, you think as you slide into the bench beside her, careful not to get caught looking in her direction. You take off your […]
In Cole Lavalais’ debut novel Summer of the Cicadas, Viola “Vi” Moon hopes to leave her experience at a mental health facility behind when she enrolls in a small black college in the south, but the stability she hoped she’d gain fractures more quickly than she anticipated. Vi thinks the best way to regain her […]
FROM SMOKE LONG QUARTERLY Smoke and Mirrors: An Interview with Dennis Norris II Your story, “Daddy’s Boy,” devastated me when I first read it, flooded me with discomfort. I had to step away and think about it, come back to it and read it again and then sort through competing emotions: admiration, disgust, sympathy. What […]
At AWP 2016, Andy Johnson delivered the following remarks as part of a Kimbilio panel on black writers in the white world. As a result of this presentation, Andy was offered a book contract! In 2014, I spoke on a panel called “Crossing (Imagined) Borders: Research, Writing, and the Challenges of the 21st Century,” at […]
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 […]
