Southern Methodist University is building a supportive relationship between black fiction writers and an SMU sister campus in Taos, N.M. Black fiction writers are encouraged to consider attending future sessions of the Kimbilio Retreat at the SMU-in-Taos campus. Participants are winding up this year’s retreat, which began Sunday and ends Saturday. The campus, bearing low, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Why You Should Read Him Because you’re tired of seeing/reading the same people, the same stories over and over. The people of Rion Amilcar Scott’s world are people who share our cities, but for most of this country, for white people like me, they may as well be on another planet, in a science fiction […]
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 […]
Paradox Lana closed the bedroom door firmly behind her, but it didn’t block out their noise. Even in the elusive moments when screams and screeches and sobbing stopped bouncing off of every solid surface, the reverberation remained. No stranger to self-sacrifice, Lana had done what she was expected to do, until, of course, she discovered […]
This week we’re celebrating the publication of novels by Kimbilio Faculty Members Mat Johnson and Dolen Perkins-Valdez. Here’s an article by Mat from BuzzFeed: Yo, I’m a mulatto. And I have to tell you, it’s great. I was black for most of my life, which is also great, but the thing is I look white […]
Recently, BOMB Magazine published a chapter that had been excised from Kimbilio Faculty Member Jeffrey Renard Allen’s SONG OF THE SHANK. Making Tom (Return): Behind the Scenes by Jeffery Renard Allen He is Tom at the same time that he is too preposterous to be Tom. (Root distinction, difference: Juluster is a rare one, but […]
