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The Terror of Racial Intimacies
1. What does it mean to examine the possibilities of deep friendship—love, even—through the lens of a queer interracial reckoning with our silences? To opt for a kind of witness that exposes the...
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Picturing The Fire Next Time
Published in 1963, The Fire Next Time brings together two essays by James Baldwin. “Letter from a Region in My Mind” originally appeared in the New Yorker in November 1962 and serves as the main text...
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Reading Baldwin after Harvey: Why Climate Change is a Social Justice Issue
In the wake of Harvey, I’m reading the title essay from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press) with my freshmen. The first lines go, “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the...
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Picturing The Fire Next Time
Published in 1963, The Fire Next Time brings together two essays by James Baldwin. “Letter from a Region in My Mind” originally appeared in the New Yorker in November 1962 and serves as the main text...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Terror of Racial Intimacies
1. What does it mean to examine the possibilities of deep friendship—love, even—through the lens of a queer interracial reckoning with our silences? To opt for a kind of witness that exposes the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Shape of Nations
I was introduced to postcolonial theory in my junior year of college. The institution I went to was, at the time, quite traditional in its focus on the Western canon. There was the occasional...
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The Impossible Citizen in Jill Magi’s SPEECH
Abu Dhabi-based poet and artist Jill Magi creates the “impossible citizen” in her latest poetry book, SPEECH. Her narrator is an investigator and an admirer of the world, who moves between unnamed...
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James Baldwin in the Archive
In 1948, the 24-year-old James Baldwin was working on a manuscript tentatively titled Ignorant Armies. The novel drew on the true story of Wayne Lonergan, a bisexual white man who had murdered his...
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Kinship and Trauma
In the spring of my freshman year, my body began to give out. Uncontrollable convulsions took over, leaving me unable to walk in the worst moments. I could vaguely sense when these convulsions were...
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Writing From Exile
Lately, I’ve been considering what it means to write from exile. But it hasn’t been until very recently that I’ve seriously considered what it might mean to write from exile within my own country. In...
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Therefore
Spic, Richie said in the cafeteria, and I don’t remember why. After, as we walked back to our fourth grade classroom, I pushed him down when he turned his back. He got up. We talked shit and started...
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The Enduring Allure of Literary Provence
Paris is almost always bound to show up in English-language literature about France, but there’s one other locale that has thoroughly captured the imagination of writers—Provence. Perhaps you’ve read...
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Out with T.S. Eliot, and In with Cathy Park Hong: Poetry Criticism in the...
The debate about whether Rupi Kaur’s poetry (and by extension, the whole genre dubbed “instapoetry”) is good or bad has apparently been revived. Whether that debate is actually useful in the terms it...
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Round–Up: Lorin Stein’s Resignation, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Lecture, and...
From Kazuo Ishiguro delivering his Nobel Lecture to the reprinting of James Baldwin’s only children’s book, we’ve rounded up the latest literary news: Lorin Stein resigned last Wednesday from his post...
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Reading Baldwin after Harvey: Why Climate Change is a Social Justice Issue
In the wake of Harvey, I’m reading the title essay from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (Beacon Press) with my freshmen. The first lines go, “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”
This blog series, Big Picture, Small Picture, provides a contextual collage for a chosen piece of literature. The information here is culled from newspapers, newsreels, periodicals, and other primary...
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Why Latinx Writers Should Decenter the Narratives That Have Been Weaponized...
One of my favorite genres of literature is bad advice. But I’m also a connoisseur of good and mediocre advice, too. I listen to it all because I never take enough time between drafts. For my sins I...
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12 Books To Help You Survive 2017 And the Trump Era
Photo by Michael Vadon Since Nov. 8, like millions of others, I’ve been trying to come to grips with Hillary Clinton’s loss. Even writing that sentence was an undertaking. It is not so much that she...
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What Country?
“What country, friends, is this?” Viola demands of a naval captain upon arriving on a foreign shore in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. After being told “Illyria,” she says, “And what should I do in...
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Writ in Water: Millimeters to the End of the World
How do you write about the end of the world? Or avoiding the apocalypse? The drying up of our water or our overdue adaptation to living with less? How do you imagine—and make real—global superstorms...
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