When asked how it felt to have President Barack Obama request she write a poem for his first inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander humbly responded: “I was just happy there was going to be a poem for the inaugural.” Alexander is a rarity—friend of presidents, daughter of civil rights leaders, Yale professor and Pulitzer Prize nominee. But above…

Toni Morrison is, inarguably, the greatest living writer of our time. She has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, a Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also the last American to have won the Nobel Prize. Her books have been canonized as classics…

Paul Beatty’s writing defies categorization. The author’s two collections of poetry and three novels have alternately been called satirical, dystopian, absurdist and postmodern. While the closest classification, Beatty himself admits, is absurdist, even that is rather wide of the mark. Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, is, on a plot level, the story of Mr. Me,…

When Barack Obama arrived on the national political stage and emerged as a presidential contender, more than one observer asked whether the young, biracial, Ivy League-educated U.S. senator was black enough to be the first African-American president. And this kind of authenticity challenge isn’t new: Many other black Americans—upwardly mobile and highly educated—are sometimes seen…

In 2010 Terrance Hayes won the National Book Award for his fourth poetry collection, Lighthead. His first book, Muscular Music, won both a Whiting Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Hayes has also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacArthur Foundation as well as a Pushcart…

Stereotypes are tricky things. When artists play with stereotypes, it is often difficult to tell if the stereotypes are being subverted or simply affirmed; one might set out to do one and end up doing the other. In James Hannaham’s sophomore novel, Delicious Foods, we are met with plenty of stereotypes that have been layered…

In medieval Europe, when a man vanquished his enemy, he killed the enemy’s wife, the enemy’s children and any other kin he could find. It was brutal; it was terrible. But it was done so that the enemy’s family would have no support, strength or even knowledge of who the man was. So that no…