The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates’ debut novel builds stories within stories, revisiting pre-Civil War America through the eyes of a survivor of the slave trade.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Round-Up: Jean Fritz, Everytown Authors Council, and Black Panther
From the passing of Jean Fritz to a new authors council aimed at preventing gun violence, here’s the latest literary news.
Five Essays That Confront the Painful Realities of Black Suffering
These articles are by no means an answer to a dangerous societal deficit that constantly stereotypes, punishes, and kills Black people. But the conversations that they both start and continue are ones that need to be had.
How to Tell a Story in a Quiet Year
There is no one way to tell a story and at the table. Some stories can be told with a map, a deck of cards, and a group of friends trying their best to build a civilization.
When Poetry and Comics Intersect
The cross-pollination between comics and poetry may seem unexpected, but it’s certainly a creative collaboration that has become more popular within the past decade. Evidence of the two forms meeting occurs again and again.
Writing the Body: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maggie Nelson, & Lidia Yuknavitch
The age of media and internet is one of fractal, ephemeral bodies—well-curated images of the self from certain angles and frozen in time, dust-coated corpses at the aftermath of a quake that provide little context, statistics and numbers that break down how many and what ages and when, yet provide little to no feeling. The…