M.G. Vassanji: Interview
by Clarence Reynolds It comes as no surprise that when M.G. Vassanji’s book won a regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize the honor was an auspicious beginning for the first-time novelist. In 1994, his novel The Book of Secrets received the inaugural Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s prestigious literary award, and further solidified Vassanji as an important literary…
William Melvin Kelley: Interview
by Steve Kemme An air of mystery clings to the writing career of William Melvin Kelley like a morning mist. In the 1960s, Kelley produced three novels and a book of short stories that established him as one of America’s most talented young fiction writers. With his first novel, A Different Drummer, published in 1962,…
The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton | NYT
Views of Life, Straightforward and Spare ‘The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010’ Review by Dwight Garner In her introduction to the excellent 1973 anthology “The Poetry of Black America,” Gwendolyn Brooks suggested that there were essentially two varieties of young black poets then extant.
Down These Mean Streets: A Piri Thomas Celebration
What does it mean to be Black, Puerto Rican, and marginalized, all within your small neighborhood, within your family? In 1967, Piri Thomas’s seminal memoir “Down These Mean Streets” chronicled his life –a young man living a hard life in the streets of El Barrio, Spanish Harlem. The book would go on to become required…
Andrea Levy
Andrea Levy Interview with Tracey L. Walters As a child growing up in England what kind of literature did you read? Were you conscious of a Black British literary tradition? I didn’t really read literature as a child. I think I’m on record as saying that I did not read a work of fiction until…
The 5th Inning by E. Ethelbert Miller
The 5th Inning by E. Ethelbert Miller Busboys and Poets and PM Press Reviewed by Vincent F. A. Golphin Baseball games are usually nine innings, so the title of the poet E. Ethelbert Miller’s memoir intrigued me. The 163-page book is a second appraisal of his life, a sort of sequel.
