This is a very special evening and a very special award for me, partly because, like all of you, I love libraries and I believe in them and the work that they do. In giving my thanks today, I’d like to talk about the roles libraries have played in my life. I was born in […]
Screening Room: Rion Amilcar Scott on Big Bird, Writing, Adulthood, and the Unfairness of Death From ELECTRIC LIT I used to joke that between apparel, toys, books and DVDs, my family was, for a time, single-handedly funding Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that produces Sesame Street. I had always been fascinated by Jim Henson’s gentle philosophical method and […]
I often travel to places I’ve read about, and I like how the remembered story unfolds as I drive, at once moving toward a destination and returning to a memory. On this particular trip, I’m rememberingErnest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, a novel that follows the 100-year life of Miss Jane, from her […]
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 […]
Welcome Akwaeke Emezi The light was gone, sucked back into the black wires that hung off the roof and stretched across the expressway, leaving the kitchen a study in blurs. Ogugua popped open the plastic crate of eggs and felt around for the matches, his pupils widening to inhale the grey air. It was so […]
The Kimbilio Blog inaugurates a new feature: Excerpts from new books by our Fellows and Faculty. From HARBORS: In October of 1994, while my mom attended a funeral, I spent time with my grandmother at the Wash Tub Laundry on Fifth Street in Hartsville. I had wanted to be outside riding bikes with my cousins […]
Down Wind When my father was fifteen he packed his clothes in a cardboard suitcase, and, over his mother’s tearful objections, caught the bus from Elton, his tiny hometown in the heart of South Louisiana’s rice country, across the border to Port Arthur, Texas, a port town at the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico. […]
