Category Archives: Educational institutions
James Baldwin’s friends
July 31, 2013 Well, at least they went to high school together, that accounts for it: DeWitt Clinton High School, in the north Bronx. By the time James Baldwin and Richard Avedon brought out Nothing Personal (1964), they’d known … Continue reading
Langston Hughes’s Children Literature
May 31, 2013 My class, “Regional, National, Global,” has no special focus on children’s literature, but it does seem to come up a lot. I think it’s because of Langston Hughes — the uncertain borders of his poetry, holding a … Continue reading
Reflections on the Conference
It’s now just shy of three weeks past April 19 and I’m still lingering on the papers presented and conversations had at the first American Literature in the World graduate student conference. “Linger” seems appropriate to my mode of contemplation … Continue reading
Samuel Delany, Marilyn Hacker?
March 20, 2013 He met her on the first day, Bronx High School of Science, September 1956. They got married five years later (in Detroit — Michigan was one of the two states where interracial marriage was not illegal). … Continue reading
Shankar, Coltrane, Whitman: Within You, Without You
December 12, 2012 2012 is full of deaths at the year’s end. Dave Brubeck last week; this week, Ravi Shankar. Shankar was half an American musician (the fractions don’t have to add up to a zero-sum game). Since 1970 he … Continue reading
Toni Morrison, Slade Morrison: More Children’s Books
September 12, 2012 Toni Morrison also had trouble with publishers. At least she managed to get it in print — The Big Box, the first of several coauthored with her son Slade, first appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1980 and, … Continue reading
Atlantic Sound: Caryl Phillips, Thomas Pynchon, Richard and Mimi Fariña
August 22, 2012 At the end of The Atlantic Sound, Caryl Phillips is in Israel, visiting a community of Black Hebrews, almost 2000 of them, African-Americans who emigrated from the United States. They have given up their U.S. citizenship, but … Continue reading
Billie Holiday, Abel Meeropol: Black/Jewish Strange Fruit
July 25, 2012 Billie sang it, but the music and lyrics were Abel’s. He had first written it as a poem, after seeing the photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana on August 7, 1930. … Continue reading
All Saints Bookstore, Beijing
June 13, 2012 We were in Hong Kong on June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. A candlelight vigil had been held in Victoria Park for the past 23 years. This year, 180,000 people showed up. There … Continue reading