Remembering Sally Hemings* On November 5, 2008 Whose silken fetters all the senses bind And soft captivity involves the mind. Imagination! Who can sing thy force? (Phillis Wheatley. On Imagination.) Sally Hemings Albemarle County, Virginia Dear Miss Phillis Wheatley, Or would you prefer Mrs. Phillis Peters? A name contains so […]
I. So there I was, almost at the crossroad Stuck in a sudden storm of bikers, men in leather, engines snarling. Flags spurt skywards. I froze at the metal barricade, the seam of sense unpicked, Brown body splayed. In the aftermath of light, what proof is there of love— Buoyancy […]
An interview Essay with Victor LaValle I first met Victor Lavalle in a Dunkin’ Donuts in Washington Heights (NYC) during the time he was drafting what would become his award-winning novel The Changeling. He was writing there, he told me, because it had just the right amount and kind of […]
Shields Green* (1836-1859) The life lives after the life As a seed is a void in the world-as-is Opening paths to worlds-could-be. If and as, where and when, remains Sewn into the Heavenly Garment Of the Unknown, halfway between there And hereafter, lodged in an either Of times’ remorseless ether […]
“Every utopia – let’s just stick with the literary ones – faces the same problem: What do you do with the people who don’t fit in?” -Margaret Atwood The Winter 2018 issue of Radcliffe Magazine featured a picture of me on its cover. Over the last few years, I’ve deposited […]
for pianist, composer, poet – friend, and mentor, Cecil Taylor The following was delivered in tribute to the great artist, Cecil Taylor (March 25, 1929-April 5, 2018), at his funeral and Memorial Service, which took place on Tuesday, April 10, 2018, in New York City. A first and only note; […]
Take a leisure look back where it all was, the gapers and blozers, haggling whack offs standing on the platform waving so long as your train rolled past, carnival mayhem’s stale moments given to eternity. Grackles quarreling on roof tops banter much more eloquent than such nincompoops swilling malt beer […]
By the time James Baldwin took the stage at the University of Chicago in May 1963 to speak on the subject of “The Moral (or Social) Responsibility of the Artist,” an impatient authority was immediately discernible. This recently unearthed recording of the novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet, reveals a weary […]
On December 6, 2017, a coalition of women Democrats led by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand—Senators Kamala Harris, Claire McCaskill, Patty Murray, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Baldwin, and Maggie Hassan—demanded that Al Franken give up his senatorial seat as a result of sexual misconduct accusations from eight different women.1 One day later, Franken […]
Prelude: Victoria Santa Cruz Me Gritaron Negra! Negra Soy! They yelled at me: Black! Black I am. And black, here, is feminine, of necessity. They yelled at me, Black Woman; they called me Black Woman. Even the men in the film shout it, dance it, are swept up in its […]
As a poet and essayist, I think of poetry as creative heuristics, a means to investigate the world and experience through language, community, identity and politics. In poetry, writer and reader engage the contents of our categorical thinking, formally and informally (in custom and usage), as well as the limits, […]
Once as a girl, she dreamed an urban kingdom. In the time of the dream, women of the kingdom were squatting over toilets, over gold chamberpots. There was one man—he was understood as the king—in all the imagined city. And this “king” walked among the women and among the pots. […]
Darkest Before Dawn?August 29, 2021
To Outwit HistoryAugust 29, 2021
“An act of survival and a strategy to heal:” Suné Woods Interview and PerformanceAugust 29, 2021
Dred Scott’s Blues: Three MeditationsAugust 29, 2021