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Award-Winning Poet Explores How We Look and See
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…
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A Horror Story of Modern Slavery and the Power of a Son’s Love
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…
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X: A Novel: How Malcolm X Grew From ‘Little’ to the Leader of a Revolution
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…
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The 15 Best Works of Fiction by Black Authors in 2014
Hope Wabuke is a Southern California-based writer and a contributing editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter. How do you speak when you speak of our literature? Do you say “African-American authors” and leave out the brilliant work of Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi and countless others who are African but not American? Do you…
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The Best 15 Nonfiction Books by Black Authors in 2014
Hope Wabuke is a Southern California-based writer and a contributing editor at The Root. Follow her on Twitter. How do you measure the worth of scholarly research and analysis versus the worth of telling one’s life story? The musicality of language versus tone and voice? These are some of the questions that one is faced…
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Yes, the Harassment Video Has Its Problems—but Mostly, It Shows How Indefensible Street Harassment Is
By now you’ve seen the street-harassment video directed and produced by Rob Bliss and starring Shoshana B. Roberts for the nonprofit organization Hollaback that’s all over the Internet. The two-minute video is cut from 10 hours of footage of Roberts walking through New York City. Throughout her walk she’s harassed by more than 100 men,…
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If We Want Diverse Books, We Need Diverse MFA Programs
Recently, in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz described his experience in his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program: His first year, he almost dropped out because it “was too white.” States Diaz: “I was a person of color in a workshop whose theory of reality did not include my most fundamental…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
