Jen Fawkes Turns Fairy Tales On Their Heads

“Looking for a book in which Medusa and Hamlet’s uncle both make appearances? This one should fill that niche perfectly. Do you like literary villains? Do you enjoy meditations on love? Well then,” reads Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Tales the Devil Told Me. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize in fabulist fiction, Jen Fawkes … Continued

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Ordinary People Have Capacity To Be Heroes

In We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars and a New York Times-bestselling author, Eddie S. Glaude Jr., makes the case that the hard work of becoming a better person should be a critical feature of Black politics. Through virtuoso interpretations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm … Continued

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January Gill O’Neil Reflects on Life through Poetry

In Glitter Road, the brilliant and beautiful collection of poems by January Gill O’Neil, we are taken from truth to tenderness, old love to new love, the Northeast to the deep South, and everywhere in between. The engaging lyric forms move seamlessly from Tina Turner to the legacy of Emmett Till to cartwheels, to a … Continued

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A. H. Jerriod Avant’s Debut Collection Cultivates Vine of Familial Memory

A. H. Jerriod Avant’s debut collection, Muscadine, cultivates the vine of familial memory, eulogizing our collective losses while exalting the succor of this human life, how the native grape’s “thick skin    [that] teeth / pierce    breaks to pour // sweetly across the tongue.” Throughout these pages, a deeply Southern sensibility balances an environmental awareness … Continued

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