Between a tweet and a book -- essays, episodes, and interviews to dig into and get inspired.
Some of the links require you to sign in with your LAHC library credentials.
If you are having problems logging in, please contact us.
Black lives in the United States are surrounded by memorials to people who did not think that black lives mattered.
That is a fact of black life in American academe. read more ...
I have been searching for safety for most of my life. I experienced a brutal assault when I was young and in that terrible moment, I learned I was vulnerable in unimaginable ways. I have come to crave safety, the idea that I can live free from physical or emotional harm. As an adult, I understand that there is no such thing as safety, that safety is promised to no one, but oh the idea of it remains so lovely, so elusive. read more ...
As a child, I often wanted things money could buy that my parents could not afford and would not get. Rather than tell us we did not get some material thing because money was lacking, mama would frequently manipulate us in an effort to make the desire go away. Sometimes she would belittle and shame us about the object of our desire. That's what I remember most. That lovely yellow dress I wanted would become in her storytelling mouth a really ugly mammy-made thing that no girl who cared about her looks would desire. My desires were often made to seem worthless and stupid. I learned to mistrust and silence them. I learned that the more clearly I named my desires, the more unlikely those desires would ever be fulfilled. read more ...
Two hours after being awakened by the Call, I get another call, from a reporter. She asks, “How did you find poetry?” Let me go on record as stating that Newbery winners should not be required to answer questions, especially on record, during the two-week period after receiving the greatest and most miraculous news of their writerly lives. This haze, this Newbery trance, if you will, is not kind to clarity and conciseness. read more ...
For some time now I have been thinking about the validity or vulnerability of a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics and circulated as "knowledge." This knowledge holds that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States. read more ...
1. Learn from the past
2. Respect the Law of Consequences
3. Be aware of your perspective
"I think I had one choice -- well, two choices. I could become a writer, or I could die really young."
American prosperity was built on two and a half centuries of slavery, a deep wound that has never been healed or fully atoned for—and that has been deepened by years of discrimination, segregation, and racist housing policies that persist to this day. Until America reckons with the moral debt it has accrued— and the practical damage it has done—to generations of black Americans, it will fail to live up to its own ideals. read more ...
