The Kevin Powell Reader: Essential Writings and Conversations

A hopeful and insightful collection by one of the great voices of our time

“Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness.” —Nikki Giovanni

“Obviously Kevin Powell has the talent to see and the courage to say. He truly keeps it real.” —Maya Angelou

Kevin Powell is one of the most prolific and acclaimed American writers, thinkers, activists, and public speakers of the past three decades. His essays, blogs, poems, articles, cultural criticisms, interviews, and speeches are important contributions to our national conversations on race, gender, class, politics, pop culture, celebrity, hip-hop, and the past, present, and future of the United States.

The Kevin Powell Reader is an electric and deeply inspiring selection from Powell’s lifework, spanning the Reagan-Bush years of AIDS and crack epidemics to our current era framed by the COVID-19 pandemic; the tragic killing of George Floyd; the #MeToo movement; and much more. In a journey that has produced fifteen books, countless cover stories, hundreds of published pieces, and definitive writings on iconic figures like Stacey Abrams, Dave Chappelle, Kerry Washington, Sidney Poitier, bell hooks, Tupac Shakur, Aretha Franklin, and Kendrick Lamar, Powell is a voice for our times, and a voice that is timeless.

This collection also tracks Powell’s personal struggles, his unwavering honesty about himself and our world, and his endless desire for freedom and justice for all people. Featuring the best of his published works alongside never-before-printed pieces, The Kevin Powell Reader captures twenty-first-century America with hope, insight, and the urgent need to preserve equal rights for all.