The Phillis Wheatley Book Awards
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The Phillis Wheatley Book Award winners are announced, annually, during the Harlem Book Fair. The awards honor the best in literature by authors of African descent.
The 2016 Phillis Wheatley Book Awards Winning Books
The Secret Kept
In the pursuit of power and fortune, one family proves there is no price too steep in order to achieve their goal; extortion, bribery and murder, even the killing of their own. This is the saga of the family Tobias, who managed to rise from the ashes of the Civil War and transform themselves from plantation owners into a present day textile conglomerate with ties to the highest office in the government. Their span of seemingly unending success has only been made possible with the help of one deep dark secret, so powerful that it could rewrite a nations history. For over a century the Tobias have kept the truth hidden behind a cloak of lies and deceit, but now as the secret threatens to get out, the Tobias show they are willing to do anything to keep it.
The Garden of Unfortunate Souls
by Eddie Mark
With compassion and superb craftsmanship, Eddie Mark invokes a world of fascinating and unforgettable characters whose trials and tears become our own. The Garden of Unfortunate Souls is a powerful debut by a writer concerned, first and foremost, with the human heart. -Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage
Breakout Author of the Year nominee, African American Literary Awards ShowNew York Book Festival Award Honorable MentionReaders Favorite 5-stars
In this tragic tale of two culturally different African American families, Eddie Mark thoughtfully and powerfully examines the intersections of power, social class, and gender (Readers+Writers Journal). In 1980s Buffalo, New York, the recession has transformed the citys proudest African American neighborhood into a ghetto. Loretta Ford, an eccentric single mother and religious fanatic, survives for years by masquerading as the owner of a dead womans house. Her reclusive life is interrupted when an unlikely incident brings the mayor of Buffalo to her home in the middle of the night. Their secret meeting sets off a chain of events that will leave two families altered forever.
Written by an author whose prose, subject matter, and characters are reminiscent of John Steinbeck (Readers+Writers Journal), The Garden of Unfortunate Souls challenges us to rethink old assumptions about the root causes of violence in urban communities. Recently nominated for Breakout Author of the Year by the African American Literary Awards Show, Eddie Mark is becoming an important new voice in African American fiction.
The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America
The Sisters Are Alright is first of all a love note Tamara Winfrey Harris has written to other black women. Its a warm, welcoming book that celebrates their complexities and humanity. I hope Harris book will be a gift given to many young black girls. I read this book to understand the specific lived experience of black women in the United States, become a better ally and just rejoice in the celebration of women of color.Bina, Reviewed at: If You Can Read ThisGOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMENs STUDIES
Whats wrong with black women? Not a damned thing!
The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves.
When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel followed close behind. In the 60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still wont let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures.
Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. We have facets like diamonds, she writes. The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.
One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York
Winner of the Christopher Award and the New York City Book AwardA history of African Americans in New York City from the 1910s to 1960, told through the life of Samuel Battle, the New York Police Departments first black officer.
When Samuel Battle broke the color line as New York Citys first African American cop in the second decade of the twentieth century, he had to fear his racist colleagues as much as criminals. He had to be three times better than his white peers, and many times more resilient. His life was threatened. He was displayed like a circus animal. Yet, fearlessly claiming his rights, he prevailed in a four-decade odyssey that is both the story of one mans courageous dedication to racial progress and a harbinger of the divisions between police and the people they serve that plague twenty-first-century America. By dint of brains, brawn, and an outsized personality, Battle rode the forward wave of African American history in New York. He circulated among renowned turn-of-the-century entertainers and writers. He weathered threatening hostility as a founding citizen of black Harlem. He served as godfather to the regiment of black soldiers that won glory in World War I as the Hellfighters of Harlem. He befriended sports stars like Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, and Sugar Ray Robinson, and he bonded with legendary tap dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson. Along the way, he mentored an equally smart, equally tough young man in a still more brutal fight to integrate the New York Fire Department. At the close of his career, Battle looked back proudly on the against-all-odd journey taken by a man who came of age as the son of former slaves in the South. He had navigated the corruption of Tammany Hall, the treachery of gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz, the anything-goes era of Prohibition, the devastation of the Depression, and the race riots that erupted in Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. By then he was a trusted aide to Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and a friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Realizing that his story was the story of race in New York across the first half of the century, Battle commissioned a biography to be written by none other than Langston Hughes, the preeminent voice of the Harlem Renaissance. But their eighty-thousand-word collaboration failed to find a publisher, and has remained unpublished since. Using Hughess manuscript, which is quoted liberally throughout this book, as well as his own archival research and interviews with survivors, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Arthur Browne has created an important and compelling social history of New York, revealed a fascinating episode in the life of Langston Hughes, and delivered the riveting life and times of a remarkable and unjustly forgotten man, setting Samuel Battle where he belongs in the pantheon of American civil rights pioneers.
In This House
Loretta Diane Walker teaches music at Reagan Elementary in Odessa, Texas. She graduated from Ector High School, received a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Texas Tech University and earned a Masters of Elementary Education from the University of Texas at the Permian Basin. Loretta is active in her community through membership in organizations such as, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and the Permian Basin Poetry Society. She is also a member of the Texas Music Educators Association, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Pennsylvania Poetry Society, Texas Mountain Trail Writers, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, and serves as a volunteer at the Wagner Noel Performing Arts Center. Loretta is a multiple Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her poems and essays appear in publications throughout the United States, Canada, and the UK. Her book Word Ghetto won the 2011 Blue Light Press Book Award. Miss Walker was elected as the 2014 Community Statesman in the Arts by the Heritage of Odessa Foundation. ABOUT IN THIS HOUSE BY LORETTA DIANE WALKER: Loretta Diane Walkers house of poems is majestic and delicate at once - immense in depth of vision and perception and tenderly sensitive in all the ways human beings need a house to be - with places to sit and remember, to treasure, and to tend. Her vibrantly descriptive poems honor the hardest days and rooms of being and believe in the beams of light coming back to us, once again, through the windows. They are poems as rich and wise as a profoundly conscious life. -Naomi Shihab Nye The deftly-written poems of In This House sing of life and loss, of illness and the courage to survive. Loretta Diane Walkers poems inhabit the world of the body in struggle with diabetes and cancer with both honesty and tenderness, just as they do the world of the heart. To borrow a line from the poem, Barbara, these poems blast beauty into the long chorus of night. -Cindy Huyser, poet and editor, author of Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems In these remarkable poems, Walker writes not only of courage in the face of adversity but also of motherhood, family, gender, race, the bounty of the natural world, and the nourishment art provides to the hunger of the human soul. Her talent as a musician infuses her lines with a haunting musicality which complements her mastery of image and diction. Walkers poems glow on the page like candles in the darkness. -Larry D. Thomas, Member, Texas Institute of Letters, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate Loretta Walker shuttles through the curls of emotions in her powerful book of poetry, In This House. Describing her mothers decline through diabetes, the delicate state of siblings comes through poems such as In the Waiting Room"". Mama was rolled in with two legs;/ she will be rolled out with one./ We are waiting/ to see who can hold back tears the longest. There is story here. Story of strength and stamina. I will give you an orange dress, Mama./ It is the only color brave enough to carry your darkness/ in its pocket. We are touched by her portrayal of her nephews broken heart in Shrine of Hormones Because I love you more than the day you were born,/ I will not tell you she is just the beginning. Her lines are clever, moving; words that linger long after the poem, such as in Jack Jack Daniels been feasting on liver,/ without onions, since before the depression. Walker is a poet on the rise, her words like a mantra to all who read, such as in How to Fight Like a Girl You must learn to walk/ through the day with a fish of fear/ floating through/ the coral of your belly. Read this book. Keep it in your nightstand. You will reach for it again and again. -Karla K. Morton, 2010 Texas Poet Laureate
Ella Pruitt
The smallest act can haunt you forever Pregnant at thirteen by a young man who comes to her hometown, Ella commits what she considers a small act to hold onto the young man. But that one small act spirals out of control and becomes something that haunts Ella for years to come as she struggles with the decision she made that fateful summer and the effect it has as it touches everyone around her including the son she gave birth to now an adult, and the prominent minister she eventually marries.Ella Pruitt, a story about memory, guilt and reckoning.
The Summer of my Fifteenth Year
Read Our Review of The Summer of my Fifteenth Year
Geri Spencer Hunter is a formidable storyteller who has crafted a genuine masterpiece with The Summer of My Fifteenth Year. When 86-year old Etta Mae Netter sits down to record her personal history, she releases a torrent of closely held family secrets that threaten to engulf her even after 71-years. Geri Hunter deftly draws us into the lives of the Netters, a well-to-do Black family living what appears to be an idyllic life in a small Iowa town during the tough times of the late 1930s. She takes us back to that summer when fifteen-year-old Etta and the rest of her family awaited the return from college of their golden boy, Charleston Epstein Netter. With clean, clear prose, and unflinching gaze, Hunter brilliantly explores and ultimately exposes the secret born of that summer, the kind of secret that destroy girls but leave the men imposing them untouched. A secret that brings a whole family to its knees. A secret that nearly destroyed Etta, but left Charleston unscathed. Seventy-one-years later the pain that never left is finally exorcised by the telling. Terris McMahan Grimes, author of Smelling Herself: A Novel
Daughter Of The Missing
Astronaut Sarai Mathews knows the end is near when a giant wave rolls in and pulls her from the beach. But something strange happens: she doesnt die. Instead, she lives and breathesunderwater. While in the depths, she meets a handsome man named Jon Luc. According to him, theyre both Gaiians, a race of beings who are equal parts human and earth spirit. Could any of this be true? Is he real and not just someone she dreamt up during the chaotic moments in the water?
For years, Jon Luc has searched for Sarais family. They are from a portion of the Gaiians who were lost to slavery and scattered across the Americas. These lost tribe members are called The Missing. Now he must keep her enemies at bay because someone else has found Sarai too, and they want to steal her birthright, the phoenix, a mythical creature that only she can capture and control.
Jon Luc will protect Sarai at all costs, but first he has to convince her of her heritage. With enemies on their trail, the pair must work together to harness Sarais newfound abilities. As a daughter of The Missing, Sarai will attract the phoenix during her next space missionand if she cant get control, it might destroy them all.
Provenance: A Novel
Read an Excerpt from Provenance: A Novel
A vivid portrait of a familys determination to live undefined by race. Hank Whitaker longed for more than society said he could have. When a fateful incident forces him to use his racially ambiguous looks to escape certain death; Hank assumes the identity of the same people that revile him. He never imagined he would fall in love and marry a white woman, but spirited Maggie Bennett changes everything. Now, Hank can never return to being the man he used to be. If the secret of his heritage is revealed he loses everything his family, his successful business and his life. When tragedy strikes again and Hank is dying, he confesses to his wife and 18-year-old son, Lance, that he is really a black man passing as white. The revelation launches the family on an epic journey as Lance tries to figure out which life to live; continue passing as his father did, or shatter the faade and become the Negro he never imagined he was. Like many African Americans, more than 200,000 before World War I, Lance flees the U.S. to find racial freedom in the liberté, égalité, fraternité of France between the World Wars. Among the wealthy expats in Europe, he finds love and a passion for art but knows that one misstep could unravel the life he has so carefully constructed. With the art world as its backdrop, PROVENANCE intertwines real people and places with fictional characters to paint a vivid picture of African Americans who defied tradition to escape racial barriers. Though each characters path is unique, as racial pioneers they share the same quest the right to live undefined by race. Self-determination, a basic and historically elusive human right, is the core of PROVENANCE. Set in the early 20th century, against the strict racist traditions of the Deep South and the freedom and vibrancy of Paris on the verge of World War II, PROVENANCE is the story of a family willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure they determine their own destiny despite their provenance. The experiences and insights of the books characters are as timely today as ever; because race still has the power to divide or unite, cannot predict success or failure and, continues to be powerless in the face of love and passion.
Severed: A Novel
by VL Towler
Read Our Review of Severed: A Novel
Listen to an Interview of VL Towler Interviewed on Portsmouth Community Radio: WSCA 106.1 FM, Hosted by Kathy Pohlman Somssich and Larry Drake
VL Towlers Severed, a novel, touches upon the issue of who controls the depiction of black culture, and explores to what extent we sacrifice the greatness of our history and culture for the price of fame. Towler won a Screenwriting Fellowship with the Writers Guild of America East Foundation, and sued a filmmaker for copyright infringement for his [similar] Academy-award-nominated original screenplay, but lost. Towlers not done talking about it. Although the novels setting is in Louisiana, it is partially inspired by events in Portsmouth, NH, where the coffins of Africans were unearthed during a municipal dig, resulting in one of the only contemporary American memorials to our African ancestors.
Dismembered fingers. Lives cut short. A local investigation will upset the tranquility of a small Louisiana town. Dr. Lula Logan has been asked by her former boyfriend, a detective with whom she had just broken up, to investigate the appearance of severed fingers left at police department headquarters. Then another dismembered finger surfaces at the home of a local producer/writer and his business partner. The writer has been AWOL, and no one knows where he is. As the investigation of the mysterious fingers deepens, we will learn that many people affiliated with the missing writers production company, including his wife, have a stake in his disappearance. Notes, emails, and flower deliveries with written threats arrive, received by different individuals who want their involvement in the intrigue to remain undetected.
Set in a contemporary rural pocket of Northwestern Louisiana, [fictional] Nakadee is a university town with a population under 15,000. The citizens of Nakadee, whose ancestors have lived there for several hundred years, while trapped in its relative remoteness, are thankful for its quiet refuge. They purposefully wish to live life in the slow lane. The town is a mix of Creole, Cajun, Black and European inhabitants. Nakadee is a sleepy hollow (near Cane River country), and is likely to grow in leaps and bounds given an anticipated natural gas pipeline construction project which will change its moribund economy.
Forensic Anthropologist Dr. Lula Logan is reluctantly drawn into the forensic investigation concerning a severed finger left at the Nakadee Police Department by her ex-boyfriend, a police detective. She goes through the process of her forensic tasks in her lab: taking measurements of the amputated fingers, boiling the human tissue [a corpse is found in the woods with a gash in its head], and studying the striae of the bones to identify the type of injuries sustained by the victim. She must also try to identify the weapon or object that might have been used to kill the victim. Dr. Lula works closely with her colleagues, Aggie Sheaf, a Medical Examiner and Tom-Tom, a Forensic Entomologist, both of whom become involved in the investigation.
The Entomologists information helps uncover the mystery of the warring species of blowfly and black soldier fly maggots that cover the corpse found in the woods. The maggots hold the key to unlocking the mystery of which individual(s) among the small towns citizenry could be the killer(s). We will learn about the role that flies play in the process of decomposition, their relevance to poultry farm rendering stations used for animal carcass disposal, and which flies are attracted to which type of once-living remains.
Two members of the House of Representatives, Congressmen Matt Killian, who represents a powerful Hollywood constituency, and an up-and-coming Congressman, Ambrose Girabeaux, a black Republican, are trying to negotiate their votes concerning upcoming Markup legislation involving the Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, which Killian chairs. The congressmen are fighting over the entertainment industry which has sought Matt Killians assurances that he will protect its interests. At the Markup, the two legislators will debate the practices of the industry.
The investigation will also reveal that power comes in all manifestations, sex being one of the most flagrant in the entertainment industry. Powerful men and women who are straight, gay, and pedophiles figure prominently in the playground of the entertainment gods, and they can also filter into the lives of people in rural outposts like Nakadee, too, as hungry and naïve innocents crave to become a part of Hollywood.
Bibsy
by Brenda Ross
Read Our Review of Bibsy
Bibsys life changes forever when she falls in love after a chance meeting in a Harlem bar in 1952. The tranquil, free-spirited lifestyle she casually enters into with Jake Tucker collides with intractable memories of a difficult past, a new community fated for development and heartbreaking loss. This multifaceted and riveting historical novel gives greater insight into the complexity of African American lives. With New York States major road and bridge construction in the background, rural enclaves become casualties of suburbanization.
Word Warrior: Richard Durham, Radio, and Freedom (New Black Studies Series)
Posthumously inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2007, Richard Durham creatively chronicled and brought to life the significant events of his times. Durhams trademark narrative style engaged listeners with fascinating characters, compelling details, and sharp images of pivotal moments in American and African American history and culture. In Word Warrior , award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durhams astounding career. Durham paved the way for black journalists as a dramatist and a star investigative reporter and editor for the pioneering black newspapers the Chicago Defender and Muhammed Speaks . Talented and versatile, he also created the acclaimed radio series Destination Freedom and Here Comes Tomorrow and wrote for popular radio fare like The Lone Ranger . Incredibly, his energies extended still furtherto community and labor organizing, advising Chicago mayoral hopeful Harold Washington, and mentoring generations of activists. Incisive and in-depth, Word Warrior tells the story of a tireless champion of African American freedom, equality, and justice during an epoch that forever changed a nation.
The Color of Love: Racial Features, Stigma, and Socialization in Black Brazilian Families
The Color Of Love reveals the power of racial hierarchies to infiltrate our most intimate relationships. Delving far deeper than previous sociologists have into the black Brazilian experience, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman examines the relationship between racialization and the emotional life of a family. Based on interviews and a sixteen-month ethnography of ten working-class Brazilian families, this provocative work sheds light on how families simultaneously resist and reproduce racial hierarchies. Examining race and gender, Hordge-Freeman illustrates the privileges of whiteness by revealing how those with blacker features often experience material and emotional hardships. From parental ties, to sibling interactions, to extended family and romantic relationships, the chapters chart new territory by revealing the connection between proximity to whiteness and the distribution of affection within families.Hordge-Freeman also explores how black Brazilian families, particularly mothers, rely on diverse strategies that reproduce, negotiate, and resist racism. She frames efforts to modify racial features as sometimes reflecting internalized racism, and at other times as responding to material and emotional considerations. Contextualizing their strategies within broader narratives of the African diaspora, she examines how Salvadors inhabitants perceive the history of the slave trade itself in a city that is referred to as the blackest in Brazil. She argues that racial hierarchies may orchestrate family relationships in ways that reflect and reproduce racial inequality, but black Brazilian families actively negotiate these hierarchies to assert their citizenship and humanity.
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
by Lauret Savoy
Sand and stone are Earths fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continents past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land lie largely eroded and lost.
In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the countrys still unfolding history, and ideas ofrace, have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, fromIndian Territory and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past.
In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons.
Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean
by James Davis
Eric Walrond (1898-1966) was a writer, journalist, caustic critic, and fixture of 1920s Harlem. His short story collection, Tropic Death, was one of the first efforts by a black author to depict Caribbean lives and voices in American fiction. Restoring Walrond to his proper place as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, this biography situates Tropic Death within the authors broader corpus and positions the work as a catalyst and driving force behind the New Negro literary movement in America.James Davis follows Walrond from the West Indies to Panama, New York, France, and finally England. He recounts his relationships with New Negro authors such as Countée Cullen, Charles S. Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, and Gwendolyn Bennett, as well as the white novelist Carl Van Vechten. He also recovers Walronds involvement with Marcus Garveys journal Negro World and the National Urban League journal Opportunity and examines the writers work for mainstream venues, including Vanity Fair. In 1929, Walrond severed ties with Harlem, but he did not disappear. He contributed to the burgeoning anticolonial movement and print culture centered in England and fueled by C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and other Caribbean expatriates. His history of Panama, shelved by his publisher during the Great Depression, was the first to be written by a West Indian author. Unearthing documents in England, Panama, and the United States, and incorporating interviews, criticism of Walronds fiction and journalism, and a sophisticated account of transnational black cultural formations, Davis builds an eloquent and absorbing narrative of an overlooked figure and his creation of modern American and world literature.
These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship
by A Yemisi Jimoh and Francoise Hamlin
Powerfully connects the history of war and peace with the long black freedom struggle in the United States, illuminating as never before the relationship between war and citizenship in the African American experience. Timothy Patrick McCarthy, coeditor of The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition
A rich, provocative compilation that will stimulate important discussions on African Americans fraught relationship with the military. Venetria Patton, editor of Background Readings for Teachers of American Literature
From enslaved people who joined Washingtons Continental Army to Buffalo Soldiers in the Indian Wars, from the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II to black men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, African Americans have been an integral part of the countrys armed forces even while the nation questioned, challenged, and denied their rights, and oftentimes their humanity.
These Truly Are the Brave collects three centuries of poems, stories, plays, songs, essays, pamphlets, newspaper articles, speeches, oral histories, letters, and political commentaries, richly contextualizing them within their specific historical moments. This anthology offers perspectives on war, national loyalty, and freedom from a sweeping range of writers including Phillis Wheatley, James Weldon Johnson, Natasha Trethewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Lucille Clifton, Vievee Francis, Michael S. Harper, Ann Petry, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and many more. Some selections reveal African Americans embracing wartime service as a way to express citizenship; others show black people remaining steadfast in quiet civilian work. Courageously wrestling with their disputed place in American democracy, these writers expose and reexamine the foundations of U.S. citizenship.
Jimmie Lee & James: Two Lives, Two Deaths, and the Movement that Changed America
by Steve Fiffer and Adar Cohen
In the early months of 1965, the killings of two civil rights activists inspired the Selma-to-Montgomery marches, which became the driving force behind the passage of the Voting Rights Act. This is their story.
Bloody Sunday March 7, 1965 was a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. The national outrage generated by scenes of Alabama state troopers attacking peaceful demonstrators fueled the drive toward the passage of the Voting Rights Acts later that year. But why were hundreds of activists marching from Selma to Montgomery that afternoon?
Days earlier, during the crackdown on another protest in nearby Marion, a state trooper, claiming self-defense, shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old unarmed deacon and civil rights protester. Jacksons subsequent death spurred local civil rights leaders to make the march to Montgomery; when that day also ended in violence, the call went out to activists across the nation to join in the next attempt. One of the many who came down was a minister from Boston named James Reeb. Shortly after his arrival, he was attacked in the street by racist vigilantes, eventually dying of his injuries. Lyndon Johnson evoked Reebs memory when he brought his voting rights legislation to Congress, and the national outcry over the brutal killings ensured its passage.
Most histories of the civil rights movement note these two deaths briefly, before moving on to the more famous moments. Jimmie Lee & James is the first book to give readers a deeper understanding of the events that galvanized an already-strong civil rights movement to one of its greatest successes, along with the herculean efforts to bring the killers of these two men to justice a quest that would last more than four decades.
Lighting the Shadow
Lighting the Shadow is about a womans evolving journey through desire, grief, trauma, and the peculiar historical American psyche of desire and violence. These poems explore the international and psychological wars women survive wars inflicted through various mediums that employ art, race, and literature. Furthermore, the collection is about a womans transformation and acceptance of her complicated attempts to balance her spirits own spectrum. Pulling the poet away from death, these poems insist that she open her life to her own powers and the powers of a greater world a world that is both bright and dark.
Bastards of the Reagan Era
Bastards of the Reagan Era is a challenge, confronting realities that frame an America often made invisible. Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world. We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.
