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For the love of books: Paul Yamazaki of City Lights Booksellers
My first read of the year is a little book of conversations between Paul Yamazaki and his friends. Yamazaki is the primary book buyer for City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco and he’s been doing the job for over 50 years. In “Reading the Room,” Yamazaki’s love for books and ideas can be felt on…
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I started reading “Democracy’s Data” about the 1940 U.S. Census today. Only a few pages in, author Dan Bouk asks a question that continues to trouble the idea of the American experience. Data can bring truth to light or make it disappear. I’m excited to dig into what was learned and what may have been…
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Poem for a Saturday Night
June Jordan reads I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies.
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Viola Davis and the Art of Living
Viola Davis doesn’t subscribe to the small worldview of a limited imagination. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are,” she tells Glory Edim on The Well-Read Black Girl podcast. Ms. Davis is one of the world’s greatest actresses. She is also an expansive thinker who claims the beautiful complexity of life. On…
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June Jordan on Black English
“The syntax of a sentence equals the structure of your consciousness.” -June Jordan. From her essay, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” In June Jordan’s university course, “The Art of Black English,” Jordan and her students explored Black English as a unique living language, “a system constructed…
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Zora Neale Hurston did it first
“The Characteristics of Negro Expression” by Zora Neale Hurston.
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Octavia E. Butler on why she became a writer
“You got to make your own worlds, you got to write yourself in. Whether you were a part of the greater society or not, you got to write yourself in.”
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Links For The Voracious
“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” -bell hooks, “Feminism is For Everybody: Passionate Politics.” Are you an early-career writer from a community that’s underrepresented in publishing? The PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship is accepting applications through January 31, 2023. The…
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Lucille Clifton on autumn
the lesson of the falling leaves the leaves believe such letting go is lovesuch love is faithsuch faith is grace such grace is godi agree with the leaves -Lucille Clifton
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“But the grandeur of life is that attempt:” Toni Morrison on what survival can look like
At a literary talk, moderator Juan Williams asked Toni Morrison and Frank McCourt this question: “How do you survive whole in a world where we are all victims of something?” Morrison’s answer offers an approach to living that can be shaped by hopefulness and imagination. She said, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive…
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