Troy

T This is the winner of the book: Ashley Harding, of Santa Monica, CA. She is pictured with her grandmother Ella Ruth Jones (93 years old) holding the prize. Ms. Jones considers Barack Obama her 4th “son.” Ashley, a huge fan of the Obamas, was very happy to win and her joy touched my heart. Congrats to Ashley, and thanks to everyone who entered the raffle. Your entries will help us enrich the lives of many others with great books.

For a limited time buy our eBook, Running to Fall (AALBC Aspire), a novel by Kalisha Buckhanon for only 99¢. The deal is only valid until Monday at 8 am, so get it now. Give the book a try and support indie publishing https://amzn.to/3ODKesE

@daniellegfny Instagram has a shop (I missed that revelation). I clicked the link to check out your shop, but you have to login through the app installed on a cell phone or tablet. I refuse to install social apps on my cell phone.

Definitely! I just hope to be alive at your age LOL! Thanks for checking in! I'm not up on the Griot Awards I'll have to look it up.

@Pioneer1 no, i did know that. There are great number of books written about king and his beliefs. From what i know he was a man trying to improve America if he was a marxist maybe we need more…. @daniellegfny i see your point. Hershel did “out Christian” especially when Herschel, exclaimed “what about the babies.” I would not be surprised if Herschel wins tbe run off despite running against a sitting Senator and having zero experience,.

@Pioneer1 what happened? When did you start espousing this belief?

@daniellegfny are you saying that Warnok is a Marxist and an atheist, someone who is increasingly representative of the Black church?

You did ask me but here is my assessment of Peele’s first three versus Lee’s first three Get Out was the the best of all 6 films. Nope and Us were the worst. But the comparison between Spike’s first film and Peele’s is unfair. Lee’s budget was a small fraction of Peele’s and Peele had the benefit of decades more of filmmaking to learn from than Lee. Given their respective environment I’d say Lee is (was) a better filmmaker. @richardmurray I appreciate the very detailed and thoughtful response, but i was looking for something a bit different. I probably posed the question wrong. I’m my opinion The Woman King was superior to the the latest installment of Black Panther. Both were superior to Nope and Us. This considers all factors genre, artistic value, story, acting, etc for my movie dollar. How would you rank the films for your entertainment experience?

“A complete nincompoop, racist…” or “America’s only hope?” Well which one is it? These views are on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. I don’t think either is true. Starting the debate from these positions is bound to be unproductive. @Stefan the man was the governor of a state and he was a heart beat away from leading the entire country — by definition he is a leader. He is clearly intelligent on some level given his resume. We may disagree with him politically, morally even, but questioning his basic intelligence is extreme and bound to lead to to false conclusions about the man.

yeah pretty much…. yeah that does seem to be true. Hey @daniellegfny when you say “Marxist” what do you mean?

We’ll y’all know how i feel about white owned—black Twitter… Musk’s control just highlights the fundamental problem with black Twitter.

@richardmurray of the movies The Woman King and the latest Black Panther film which one did you prefer and how would to rate the artistic merit of either film relative to the last two Peele films?

Yeah maybe i didn’t understand it either. I had not considered that, but if you have to be that smart or think that hard is it a “good” film?

yeah writing for the web means short simple text. Rising social media means immediately engaging short videos. It is a wonder anyone still reads a novel. I haven’t even considered the physical aspects. I try to stare off in the distance rather than looking at my screen for so long, but I’m sure my eyesight has suffered given my vocation… what did the Uni bomber say about technology?

@richardmurray sorry I missed your question. I would not change a thing in the film. I would not have made it. The same goes for the new film Nope. I paid 5 bucks to stream it from home and it too was a disappointing film. It was marginally better than Us, in my opinion, largely because of the skilled actors. I really liked Get Out, so I'm not hating on Jordan -- he is very talented and I enjoy his comedy. The last two films though were pretty disappointing to me. Am i the only one who feels this way?

@Delano, think social media put on steroids. Business people are excited about it because there is a great deal of profit in monetizing control over people. I now understand why Marky Z is all in on this technology. The last thing I want is to give that guy is the ability to hack into my brain with greater ease. So, I will use the technology very cautiously and judiciously. Now I know there are people who will say "Oh not me, my brain can't be hacked. The metaverse is just a way for me to have fun with my friends." To me, this is a variation of the ideas that Covid is a hoax, climate change is not exacerbated by human activity, or slavery wasn't all that bad for the Blacks. This tech is great; it is the people who use it for perverse goals that make it a problem.

Yeah or was definitely a good look @ProfD if I had a publicist working for me that could have been parodied into more opportunities 🙂 @Pioneer1 it was a panel. me and the two women. one worked for Amazon curating content (I believe) and the other runs a small press in brooklyn. The panel was part of a much larger event called “The Future of Everything” They had exhibitors and i really got a good sense of what the metaverse and augmented reality is like.

Well that is because y'all don't read the Black Literature Forum: https://aalbc.com/tc/forum/4-black-literature/ @Pioneer1 it is good to know YouTube's algorithm is sharing some of my content. And nobody knows me like y'all do 😉 Thanks for sharing the video here!

Contact: Travis Hutchins, Baton Rouge Area Foundation, thutchins@braf.org, (225) 381-7081 or Sarah Gardner, Baton Rouge Area Foundation sgardner@braf.org, (225) 387-6126 Jacinda Townsend wins 16th Annual Ernest Gaines Book Award for Mother Country Jacinda Townsend’s novel Mother Country has won the 2022 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, presented annually by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation to support an emerging African American fiction writer. She receives $15,000 to support the continuation of her craft. A national panel of literary judges selected the winner from 25 eligible entries. The judges commended two additional books of fiction for the award's shortlist: Stories from the Tenants Downstairs by Sidik Fofaria and Nobody's Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong. The 16th annual Gaines Award will be presented to Townsend at 6:00 p.m., Thursday, January 19, 2023, at the Manship Theatre in the Shaw Center for the Arts. Townsend will read from her work at the award ceremony. The award is given to honor the late Ernest Gaines, whose stories gave voice to African Americans in rural areas. “[Mr. Gaines’s] A Lesson Before Dying was one of the books that most taught me how to weave searing social justice with the pleasure of storytelling, so it is a special honor to be part of this long tradition of excellence in African-American literature,” stated Townsend. “Writing is such a lonely enterprise for African-American storytellers, given that most of the industry's gatekeepers are not us. It's lovely to know that the community I started writing for, the community for which I will always primarily write, has read my work and found that it resonates. I am particularly looking forward to working with children in the Baton Rouge schools, as I am passionate about arts education.” Townsend is also the author of Saint Monkey, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize in addition to being selected as the 2015 Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Townsend is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Recent winners of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence include The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris; Everywhere You Don’t’ Belong by Gabriel Bump, Lot by Bryan Washington; A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley, and; The Talented Ribkins by Ladee Hubbard. About Ernest J. Gaines: Literary legend Ernest Gaines was a native of Oscar in Louisiana’s Pointe Coupee Parish which served as the setting for many of his novels. During his lifetime, Gaines received a National Medal of Arts Award (2013), a MacArthur Foundation’s Genius Grant, and the National Humanities Medal among numerous others. He was a member of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His critically acclaimed novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was adapted into a made-for-TV movie that won nine Emmy awards. His 1993 novel A Lesson Before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. About the Baton Rouge Area Foundation: The Baton Rouge Area Foundation improves the quality of life in Greater Baton Rouge and across south Louisiana in three ways. The Foundation connects philanthropists with the causes they care about, provides support to nonprofits and takes on projects for civic good.

@Chevdove Hebrew to Negroes will be a bestselling book when I publish my next list in a few weeks. There are actually four books in the series. I'm not a Biblical scholar but I know a little about African History and I think it is obvious that Europeans don't have a lock on the religion. I've heard prominent Black scholar Dr. Ben. say he was a Jew. When he said that it seemed odd to me, but this was decades ago and what I knew about African history was from the European perspective, which is to say I knew less than nothing.

Ending remote work and asking for more effort is not exactly tyrannical 😉 Musk reminds me of Trump the media can't get enough of him -- they really can't help themselves. Since Musk took over traffic to twitter is actually up a bit. They are one of the most popular sites on the web ranking #11 by SEMRish's estimates. Spending virtually nothing on Google ads -- why should they the media is their best promoter. For comparison purposes AALBC ranks number 31K.

@Pioneer1 I guess the problem in catching the sarcasm in your title is that most people expected Twitter to be different under Musk -- mostly worse. Were you trying to imply that people would think it would be different, but that nothing has changed? I suspect I'm the only one in this conversation that uses Twitter and I go in there with blinders and post things to promote AALBC and react to any comments. The only recent exceptions was to find Kyrie's "antisemitic" post and look at Musk's page. Both activities were a waste of my time,,.

That is just what I was thinking that too! I am surprised Black people support tRump, but I guess they support himfor the same reasons some white people do. Dave Chappelle described a couple of reasons in his recent SNL monologue. I think labeling all Trump supporters as racist is simplistic and inaccurate. His Black support should make that obvious. I don't want a Republican in the Whitehouse in 2024 -- period. It will be some version of Trump the way the party is going.

This is true, but it is not just us, it is the culture. But like everything else we suffer more as a result. The elections themselves don't have to be rigged. Gerrymandering, the electoral college, and voting rules have created an environment in which our representatives do not represent the majority of people. This is true. Individuals may be able to improve their lot by running somewhere else, but thrive as a people, we have to do what ProfD wrote, I don't know enough about the sister from Cali, but in general, I tend to agree with Stefan, "Any election victory for a Black face that is not shoved against Trump's backside is a good for our people."

Now that is very interesting.