The typical story set in New Orleans begins and ends somewhere in the French Quarter, but Sarah M. Broom’s meaty new memoir “The Yellow House” stretches our attention seven miles east, to the neighborhood where she and thousands of others live beyond the glitz of the city’s most famous district.
Broken into four movements spanning nearly a century, “The Yellow House” is the story of connection, longing and migration. Who belongs to a city, Broom asks over 300 pages. Whose stories are worth capturing and telling?
She begins her family’s story with the title dwelling. The house sat for 50 years in New Orleans East, more than 40,000 acres developed in the 1950s. It was built on what was “largely cypress swamp, its ground too soft to support trees or the weight of three humans,” Broom writes. Still, NASA’s massive Michoud Assembly Facility went up in 1940, anchoring the idea of a vibrant community to young families.
These promises lured in Ivory Mae Broom, Sarah’s mother. Widowed at 19, a mother of two, she used $3,200 from the life insurance payout to purchase a small green house on Wilson Avenue in 1961. Over the next five decades, the household would swell to hold twelve children. Sarah is the youngest — her eldest sibling, Simon Jr, is thirty years her senior.
Broom, 39, captures the life of her family with vigor. Her storytelling is most vivid when she writes about her father Simon Broom, Ivory Mae’s second husband. He died when Sarah was just six months old, collapsing in the bathroom. But his presence looms large as the writer relies on interviews with her mother and various siblings to paint a portrait of a man she never knew.
“My father is six pictures,” she writes. “These photos can be shuffled around, pinned up on my wall in various configurations, held up high in the palm of my hand, and then dropped to the ground and still they are only six pictures.”
But the Yellow House (which got its nickname when Ivory Mae purchased yellow siding in the 1990s) was never quite the oasis the Brooms were seeking. The place somehow bogged down into a perpetual state of disrepair. Simon built a poorly constructed and incomplete addition to the back of the house, the walls exposed and the bathroom unfinished. The family took to “carrying boiled water through the house and to the bath in our red beans and rice pot.”
The house, as Sarah writes, became more of a shackle for her mother, trying to manage its upkeep while simultaneously raising 12 children on a nurse’s aide’s salary. Her refrain was “You know this house not all that comfortable for other people” whenever one of the children wanted to invite a friend home. Non-relatives rarely crossed the threshold during Sarah’s childhood.
The Katrina section, simply titled “Water,” is gut-wrenching. Most of the Brooms were safely out of harm’s way when the hurricane hit in August 2005, but two of her siblings, Carl and Michael, didn’t make it out of New Orleans East before the onslaught. Carl rode out the storm at his home, while Michael hunkered down at a girlfriend’s apartment.
“You thinking that’s mannequins floating by you, but when you get by it that body smell so bad, it then swoll up big,” Carl told his sister. “Man that ain’t no mannequin, that’s a dead body.”
The water knocked the Yellow House off its foundations and the city later abruptly bulldozed it, ending a chapter of the Broom history for good.
Post-Katrina, the memoirist takes a job in Mayor Ray Nagin’s office, lasting only six months as a speechwriter before burning out. “More and more I began to feel that I was on the wrong side of the fence,” Broom writes, “selling a recovery that wasn’t exactly happening for real people.”
Broom is a master at the minutiae, conjuring a neighborhood hovering below its potential, neglected by the powers that be. The house itself is so carefully depicted you can see the hand-sewn curtains and the frayed edges of the kitchen linoleum.
For all its attention to detail, “The Yellow House” is slow to ignite. Broom lingers in her mother’s and grandmother’s childhood too long, giving too many peripheral characters space that feels unearned. With such a wide family tree – Broom currently has 50 nieces and nephews – it’s impossible to flesh out each relative. Still, she brings to life those she knows best.
The memoir does balance personal narrative and journalistic inquiry, with Broom centering the city of New Orleans at every turn. The streets, the homes, the neighbors all feel grounded in time.
Her story, and the larger story of the Broom clan, is worth finding, well off the beaten path.
At 85, N. Scott Momaday – considered the dean of Native American literature – is attracting renewed accolades for his life’s work. In 2018, he won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and entered the National Native American Hall of Fame. In May, he received the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize and this November will be feted with a Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
“If we are to understand the synthesis of literature and peace, we must first consider that the end of art is the definition of the human condition,” Momaday said in a press release. “In its ultimate realization the human condition is a state of peace. Peace is the objective of human evolution, and literature is the measure of that evolution.”
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, begun in 2006, serves as the only annual book prize to recognize “the power of the written word to promote peace.”
“N. Scott Momaday’s body of work illustrates the power of ritual, imagination, and storytelling to mediate between cultures, produce peace through intercultural understanding, and heal individuals damaged by conflict,” said Sharon Rab, the founder and chair of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation. “By honoring and safeguarding the storytelling traditions of our nation’s indigenous communities, his writings at the same time affirm the value of a multicultural society.”
When the writer won his Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement prize, Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. struck a similar note. He called Momaday “at root a storyteller who both preserves and expands Native American culture in his critically praised, transformative writing.” Momaday made himself at home the next day with a historic presentation at the City Club of Cleveland, where he was the first indigenous American to address the club.
Momaday made history in 1968 with his first novel, House Made of Dawn. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year and ushered in a mid-century renaissance of Native American literature.
In Dayton, the peace prize’s fiction and nonfiction winners will be announced September 17, with the awards ceremony to follow on November 3. Momaday joins literary giants Louise Erdrich, Taylor Branch, and Wendell Berry as recipients of this honor.
In 2015, Brooklyn, New York-based artist OlaRonke Akinmowo lugged 100 books — all written by black women — to a brownstone stoop and launched the uncertain beginnings of her newest project, the Free Black Women’s Library.
Dressed in a black tank top and gold leggings, Akinmowo danced barefoot in front of her collection “in honor of the sacred beauty” of these authors.
“Black women’s words have saved my life, healed me, nurtured me and provided me with the comfort that I’ve needed in every rough moment of my life,” Akinmowo wrote in an Instagram post commemorating that anniversary, “and I wanted to share that fact/testimony.”
As the first patron arrived — an 8-year-old girl in a vibrant, multicolored dress — Akinmowo watched a mobile library featuring black women authors become a necessary idea.
In this organic process, she found new spaces to display the books — museums, theaters, art galleries, churches, and festivals. Now, four years later, up to 200 people will come through the library’s traveling installation each month.
“I want it to feel inclusive and diverse,” Akinmowo said in a phone interview. “That’s why I like to have everything from children’s books to young adult to erotica. Even if people come not knowing what they’re looking for, they’ll find something.”
What started out as Akinmowo’s personal collection quickly multiplied ten-fold. Donations began pouring in from publishers, writers, online supporters and of course, patrons themselves, who adhere to the “bring a book, take a book” code.
Usually they’re looking for the classics, Akinmowo said. Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks are perennial favorites. “Toni Morrison…she’s iconic. Whether it’s Bluest Eye or Jazz or Sula or Paradise. They come in asking, ‘Do you have any Toni Morrison?’”
She doesn’t catalog the books or direct patrons to any particular author. Instead, she allows the library to exist in a more interactive way, making the search for a resonant title part of the fun. She does, however, note which genres people are seeking. (After “Black Panther” was released last year, she noticed an uptick in the number of people looking for science fiction.)
The 40-something curator turned to books to get through a difficult childhood in Brooklyn. “Having an unstable family, libraries offered me comfort, safety, resources, inspiration, education,” she said, adding that she began reading around age 3. ”That’s part of the foundation for my project – my love for libraries and books.”
Library guests assemble for a discussion with Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of the essay collection, “Thick.”
That love is apparent at the pop-ups. Everything is free, from the books themselves to the associated community conversations that spring up around a monthly theme. One of their recent events featured bell hooks’ All About Love, and the discussion that followed pulled from the text.
The library thrives thanks to donations and volunteers who move the books from space to space each month. Akinmowo runs it as a side project amidst her day jobs as a set decorator and yoga teacher. She is currently seeking funding to make the library more sustainable and even more community oriented.
Enthusiasts are adapting the model in different cities — most notably Atlanta, Detroit and Los Angeles. “Having branches and forums in other cities was something I always dreamt could happen,” Akinmowo said, “so it’s really exciting to see that visualization become reality.”
Frequently, the founder invites poets and writers to share in the space. Last month, author Tressie McMillan Cottom came up from Virginia to discuss her newest book, Thick, with library guests, a move that surprised and inspired Akinmowo. Cottom’s collection of essays on race, beauty, politics and media proved a fertile starting point for the assembled patrons.
“These intimate vulnerable conversations we’re having between strangers is so powerful,” Akinmowo said. “That deep connection. We talked for two and a half hours. It was a full house. Seeing these black women share themselves, creating a space where black women can feel seen and heard…it feels like really sacred work.”
In the books that followed, Whitehead, now 49, has consistently delivered on Updike’s phrase – culminating in 2016’s “The Underground Railroad,” in which he places an actual time-traveling railroad beneath the country’s soil to wend its way from the days of slavery through the nation’s tortured history.
Now Whitehead arrives at a new milestone. He is the first writer since August 2010 to grace the cover of Time magazine, profiled by novelist Mitchell S. Jackson under the headline “America’s Storyteller.” The profile is timed to the publication of “The Nickel Boys” July 16.
Nine years ago, the Time cover headline was “Great American Novelist,” printed across the left shoulder of Jonathan Franzen.
In the laudatory new magazine profile, Whitehead is quoted saying that he followed his first novel, “The Intuitionist,” about a Manhattan elevator inspector, with “John Henry Days” wanting this second book “to be more expansive and have many different voices, a big American chorus. ‘John Henry Days’ is very unruly, like the country itself.”
“I had never read anything with an enslaved person as its main character where I really felt that sense of dread, claustrophobia and the narrowing of choices,” Ward told Time. “I felt the book could be a breakthrough experience for some people.”
One month after the book’s publication, Whitehead read from its pages in Cleveland at the Maltz Center as part of the Skirball Writer’s Center Stage series. As the author flipped seamlessly from Brooklyn hipster patter to pulling sentences directly from the novel, some listeners were audibly shocked.
Whitehead – who was called “Chipp” as a kid – switched over to Colson when he was 21. Time reports that “he learned only a few years ago that Colson, the name of his maternal grandfather, was also the name of an enslaved Virginia ancestor who purchased his and his daughter’s freedom.”
The writer’s resonance with history extends to his everyday conduct. While visiting the Langston Hughes House in Harlem, Whitehead carefully hung his coat in the hallway before the program director’s tour. “I didn’t want to disrespect Langston’s house,” he told Mitchell Jackson later.
The new novel, “The Nickel Boys,” was “inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida,” Whitehead writes in his acknowledgments. He credits reporter Ben Montgomery’s series in the Tampa Bay Times and University of South Florida’s Dr. Erin Kimmerle’s forensic studies of the school’s unmarked graves. And he directs readers to their websites.
Whitehead told Time that this new book is “about places with no accountability. That dynamic between the powerful and the helpless, where our worst impulses can be let loose.”
The school, notorious for its abuses, closed only in 2011. Jackson writes that “The Nickel Boys,” set in the 1960s, presents an honest story “about the human capacity to outlast the terrors of injustice.”
The subhead on the Time Magazine cover is “By Mining the Past, Colson Whitehead Takes Readers Into An Uneasy Present.”
Readers of Eugene Gloria’s poems have a cultivated patience, a relationship with time. It has been seven years since the publication of his last book, “My Favorite Warlord,” winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
In 2013, Henry Louis Gates Jr. praised Gloria’s poetry by remarking on his own keen interest in genealogy. The Anisfield-Wolf jury chair located a kinship in the poet’s exploration of our origins “as a key to the present [that] is compelling, addictive, and – in the best circumstances – generative. It is this last quality that is evident on every page.”
Gloria, 62, is deeply attuned to heritage and displacement. Arrivals and departures cycle through all four of his considered, beautiful and nimble poetry collections.
“My Favorite Warlord” opens with “Water,” a 39-line poem that took Gloria five years to write. Reading it now, it seems to flow toward the new book, “Sightseer in This Killing City.” The poet Yusef Komunyakaa identified “a playful exactness” in Gloria’s first collection, “Drivers at the Short-Time Motel,” which remains just right describing this new work.
The speaker of the title poem, “Sightseer in This Killing City” is in Dallas:
When I arrived, I saw the grassy knoll
Down that killing square. My cousin sick
and so I came with only Roethke’s line:
‘On things asleep, no balm.”
This poem may be set in Texas, but the book’s sensibility is informed by the troubling ascendancies of Philippines President Rodrigo Duarte and the U.S. President Donald Trump, both elected in 2016. The title poem ends, “And tomorrow is the past,/a gurney’s wheels squeaking/dry and violent through contagious halls.”
Democracies in the hospital, perhaps, the world a place of contagion, which “smiles wide as elevator doors.” The dis-ease is clearly infectious, leaving the reader, like a voter, to puzzle this out.
Gloria, born in Manila as his parents’ youngest child, grew up on both sides of the Pacific Ocean after his family settled in San Francisco. He has traveled widely but has lived mostly in the Midwest, the last two decades as a professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana.
In the 48 poems of “Sightseer in This Killing City,” there is an exquisite, erudite, yet plain-spoken care with language from a poet well-read across continents and centuries. Snippets of verse from William Shakespeare and Charles Baudelaire crop up; so does a line from an Al Green song.
Anisfield-Wolf winning poet Marilyn Chin observes that Gloria’s new book tells unsettling stories “that praise ordinary people.” This is exactly right, including people on buses and those waiting in terminals. Poet Rigoberto Gonzalez calls the experience “a blessing to have Eugene Gloria help us reckon with the troubles histories that shape America [and] the Philippines.”
The new collection’s first poem, “Implicit Body,” ends stunningly by re-purposing a rift from a Stevie Wonder song. Gloria writes: “Call me Mr. Gone / who’s done made / some other plans./All that remains is nostalgia/and this aching torso of blue.”
One innovation is a persona Gloria calls Nacirema. The poet explains that the name “comes from artist Michael Arcega’s clever use of nomenclature as a way of examining Filipino American identity as well as his repurposing of Horace Miner’s essay ‘Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,’ from American Anthropologist, 1956.
The issue of the magazine published a few months before little Eugene was born in the capital city. It is a continuing pleasure to dwell in the worlds, and work, that child has wrought.
by Lisa Nielson
A colleague at the Cleveland Council on World Affairs generously nominated me for a professional exchange, sponsored by World Learning, that has me packing my bags for India.
But what about books? How do I prepare for my first visit to a place with over 4,000 years of history? While I’ve lived in Jerusalem and Damascus – no slouches in the antiquity department – the weight of time and the linguistic, environmental and cultural diversity of India are daunting. Armed with a list of helpful articles and suggested reading from the marvelous program director at World Learning, Dianne Neville, I went to the public library.
Because I’m a medievalist, everything past the 17th century is distressingly recent. My association with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards helps me remember that the modern and contemporary are not foreign countries. The Anisfield-Wolf canon speaks with the past without flinching. It has helped me gaze directly at the present.
The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan is my first stop in the present. A 2017 Anisfield-Wolf book award winner for fiction, Mahajan’s novel tracks the aftermath of a marketplace bombing in New Delhi. The novel begins with the statement “A good bombing begins everywhere at once.” Readers learn a Kashmir dissident has detonated the device and that a Muslim and Hindu family are irrevocably damaged. Tender, brutal and often wildly funny, the story follows the aftermath through the perspectives of the victims, survivors, families and the bombers themselves. Mahajan sheds light on religious tensions, politics, bureaucracy and corruption, making this novel a thoughtful companion to Katherine Boo’s journalistic masterpiece Behind the Beautiful Forevers.
Incarnations: A History of India in 50 Lives by Sunil Khilnani (2016, Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This fascinating book traces India’s history through the lens of 50 people, some important historical figures, others obscure to me. I’ve met new poets, artists, musicians, scientists and religious figures. Sunil deftly wraps each story within a contemporary context – how a state continues to revere a certain figure, the religious implication of another – giving even the most ancient figures relevance. Khilnani, a scholar best known for The Idea of India, has inspired me to find and tackle the poetry of Basava (12th century), Kabir (15th century) and Mirabai (Meera, 16th century), who wandered North India singing love songs to Krishna.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (2012, Random House) by Katherine Boo. This much-honored book won a Pulitzer Prize and has been sitting on my mental “must-read” list for a year. Boo spent many years following the fortunes of the residents of Annawadi, a ramshackle settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels ringing the Mumbai airport. An American who won a MacArthur genius grant before writing this first book, Boo is masterful at seeing what so many Westerners would miss in the enterprising teen trash-picker, the girl who is managing to attend college, the slum-landlords and duplicitous nuns.
The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press, 2009) by Wendy Doniger. This title, recommended by a friend, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and represents the life’s work of a leading scholar on Hinduism. (Khilnani references her work as well.) As India grapples with the religion’s growing power within its contemporary politics, this fat book is timely. Doniger explores the intersection of the historical record with mythological worlds, examining Hinduism’s classic resistance to standardization. She considers how Sanskrit and vernacular sources are rich in knowledge of women and lower castes, and how animals are key to important shifts in religious attitudes.
Kama Sutra, Bhagavad Gita, sections of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Puranas, Laws of Manu. I’ll reacquaint myself with these beautiful foundational works as essential preparation for my travels.
Finally, my group will visit Lucknow, which was the center of a sophisticated courtesan culture well into the 19th century. I can’t wait. In my class on the courtesan, I teach Umrao Jan Ada by Mirza Rusva (a pseudonym). One of the first novels written in Urdu, it follows the life of a fictitious Lucknow courtesan Umrao Jan. Steeped in lush images of the loves and tragedies of a courtesan life, Umrao Jan Ada immerses the reader in the social intricacies of Lucknow in the 19th century. (There are two wonderful Bollywood films, too.) The British shattered Lucknow’s culture in 1857 in defeating the Sepoy Mutiny, which was partly bankrolled by local courtesans. Rusva paints the effects of that history and colonialism well.
Lisa Nielson is an Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She has a PhD in historical musicology, with a specialization in Women’s Studies, and teaches seminars on the harem, slavery and courtesans.
Anisfield-Wolf Fellow Zachary Thomas has sparked an idea that is igniting across Northeast Ohio.
In 2016, as a sophomore at John Carroll University, Thomas pioneered a creative writing program for youth incarcerated in an Ohio juvenile detention center. Writers in Residence began as an idea to reduce recidivism by bringing adolescents behind bars together with college students to build long-lasting relationships and build up self-expression.
The idea germinated from the example set by Carroll Ballers, an older student initiative using basketball as an entry point for fun, food and mentorship among the residents of juvenile detention facilities and undergraduates.
Inside these centers, Thomas quickly learned that residents had few chances to write. Authorities allowed no pens or paper in private quarters. If a resident wanted to put down a thought, a prison staffer would hand over a crayon.
After Thomas’ mother died, the 18-year-old Washington D.C. native turned to writing to uncover “what my heart needed to feel, what my mind needed to understand.” Thomas thought it might work as a similar catharsis for young residents bottled up in a place where emotions run high.
So Thomas enlisted the help of trusted allies at John Caroll: professor Philip Metres, and friends Anthony Shopolik, Rachel Schratz, and Michalena Mezzopera. Together, they cooked up a pilot writing workshop to see if the idea had legs.
The first session got off to a bumpy start. “No one talked. That was really scary,” said Thomas, now 23. “But they were seeing what we were about. Which is fair, because we’re coming into someone’s home, so to speak. We’re strangers, so they have to vet us.”
The program began in earnest in spring 2017, with two groups of John Carroll students converged on two different facilities, working with male and female residents at the Cuyahoga County Juvenile Detention Center and Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility.
“We go for 12 weeks and by that ninth week we’ve gotten so close to the residents that we’ve become a family together,” Thomas said of the weekly sessions. “That puts us in a place to empathize, but also see them for who they really are.”
The student volunteers and incarcerated peers spend their 90-minute sessions discussing short pieces of literature, connecting the art to the one another’s lives. The offenses are sidelined, unless the residents themselves volunteer why they are locked up, Thomas said. “I don’t know why they’re in there. I’ve never asked. That’s not my priority. I’m more interested in who they are.”
To build trust with the residents, the program requires a strict commitment from volunteers, ensuring that the same faces show up week after week.
“We want people who are going to be reliable forces,” Thomas said. “For a lot of the residents, they don’t have a lot of that. They build their day or week around it. For you not to come, you disrupt their whole world.”
The residents themselves have found value in the program. “It lets us open up with what is easy to write rather than say,” one wrote in the post-workshop survey. “[It’s a] respectful environment where we can speak openly.”
“The first time we [published the chapbook], one of the residents read his name and said, ‘This is regal,” Thomas said. “His work was on display. That act of being published gave him the realization. It’s a good feeling to have. It’s your own hard work.”
The spring 2019 chapbook features Lucille Clifton-inspired poems and a smattering of “six-word memoirs,” among other short pieces. In one of the poems, a resident writes: won’t you celebrate with me for I/ have been taking care of and raising/ babies since I was six and being in/ here is the only break I’ve had.
Another offers: I don’t know how to begin this/ Life is a gamble.
Writers in Residence expanded this spring to Oberlin College, embedding the program in the Lorain County Juvenile Detention Home. It will encompass programs based in three more colleges during the fall semester: the College of Wooster, Youngstown State University and Hiram College.
“It was a lucky day when professor Phil Metres left me a message asking if the Cleveland Foundation might help with a program in the Cuyahoga Hills Juvenile Correctional Facility,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. “That led to meeting Zach Thomas and attending one of his Writers in Residence sessions. I was floored by the authentic friendship and joshing vulnerability among the young men. And I was struck, as a literary critic, that the writing they did together was of such a high caliber.”
Thomas, who draws a salary through a Cleveland Foundation grant, will work as the liaison between the schools and the detention centers. He wants to ensure the expansion programs stay laser-focused on the youth they serve.
“[The residents] have a strong BS meter,” he said. “A lot of people can talk, but you have to come through with some action.”
Chatti reads “The Rules” in her mellifluous, thoughtfully inflected voice in the audio clip. She states that she “wanted to write about the walk I took . . . in Madison, Wisconsin, and the brief, vital moment of joy that indicated my year-long depression might finally lift.” To do so, Chatti knew she would need to break the conventions of her craft, the rules.
Fortunately, the poet is already adept at upending expectations. “This poem has no children; it is trying/to be taken seriously,” she writes in “The Rules” with characteristic puckishness.
There will be no stars—the poem has had enough of them. I think we
can agree
we no longer believe there is anyone in any poem who is just now
realizing
they are dead, so let’s stop talking about it. The skies of this poem
are teeming with winged things, and not a single innominate bird.
You’re welcome. Here, no monarchs, no moths, no cicadas doing
whatever
they do in the trees. If this poem is in summer, punctuating the blue—
forgive me,
I forgot, there is no blue in this poem—you’ll find the occasional
pelecinid wasp, proposals vaporized and exorbitant, angels looking
as they should. If winter, unsentimental sleet. This poem does not take
place
at dawn or dusk or noon or the witching hour or the crescendoing
moment
of our own remarkable birth, it is 2:53 in this poem, a Tuesday, and
everyone in it is still
at work. This poem has no children; it is trying
to be taken seriously. This poem has no shards, no kittens, no myths or
fairy tales,
no pomegranates or rainbows, no ex-boyfriends or manifest lovers,
no mothers—God,
no mothers—no God, about which the poem must admit
it’s relieved, there is no heart in this poem, no bodily secretions, no
body
referred to as the body, no one
dies or is dead in this poem, everyone in this poem is alive and pretty
okay with it. This poem will not use the word beautiful for it resists
calling a thing what it is. So what
if I’d like to tell you how I walked last night, glad, truly glad, for the
first time
in a year, to be breathing, in the cold dark, to see them. The stars, I
mean. Oh hell, before
something stops me—I nearly wept on the sidewalk at the sight of them
all.
by Lisa Nielson
Sometimes when I need serious advice, I visit Edith.
Edith Anisfield Wolf, the founder of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, is interred in the mausoleum at Knollwood Cemetery in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. You’ll find her remains in the corridor to the right of the little chapel as one walks in: #321. I track down one of the battered folding chairs scattered around the mausoleum and sit in the humid quiet. She is one of the most influential women in my life who I have never met.
When I first started getting to research the poet and philanthropist, I was shocked by the paucity of information about her. The archives at the Cleveland Public Library contain nearly every book that won the Anisfield-Wolf award, but information about the founder herself is in just a few slim folders. The files consist mostly of copies of newspaper clippings and notes, but nothing original.
Wolf was wealthy and deeply involved in the Cleveland community her entire life: Where were her letters? Her business records? As an Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Fellow and music historian by training, I wished to contribute in some way to her history. I wondered if Wolf would disapprove my rooting in her past, although I am shameless in my love for the thrill of the chase.
What began as a casual interest in Wolf quickly blossomed into a full-blown obsession. I spent hours in the Western Reserve looking for correspondence, information about the family business and the awards themselves. While on a research trip in Jerusalem, I dedicated a few days to researching the Cleveland Jewish population and the rich archives held in the National Library of Israel.
Through the archives and various genealogy databases, I skimmed the surface of her family. Her father, Jechiel Jonas Anisfield, became John when he emigrated from Poland to the United States, with a stop in Vienna for gymnasium in between. A respected businessman in the textiles industry, he included Edith in the family business from the time she was 12. He was well educated and spoke several languages, and ensured his daughter had the same privileges. Wolf’s sister, Lucie, died at age 9 in 1901, and the following year, she lost her mother, Daniella (sometimes Doniella or Daniela). Her father remarried Alice Strauss of the influential New York Strauss family two years later. He died in 1929, and Alice died in 1946.
Wolf graduated from East High School in 1906 and enrolled at the Mather College for Women, but did not graduate. In August 1918, she married lawyer and Cleveland native Eugene Wolf. He helped run the family businesses and served as president of Tifereth Israel.
In addition to her business acumen, Wolf was a poet and patron of the arts, unanimously elected to serve as a member of the board of the Cleveland Public Library in 1943. The Anisfield family has an elegant little crypt in the Mayfield Cemetery mausoleum. John, Daniella, Lucie, Alice, and Eugene, who died in 1944, are all there. The Wolf family is buried nearby. There is space in the crypt, yet Edith is conspicuously absent. That raises a question: Why?
Although an extremely private person, Wolf can be glimpsed through her philanthropic legacy. In addition to the book awards, her fund also endowed the Anisfield-Wolf Memorial Award, which has been administered by the Cleveland Welfare Federation (now the Center for Community Solutions) each year since her death in 1963. Wolf left her books to the Cleveland Public Library, three paintings and other art pieces to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and her house on East Boulevard to the Welfare Federation. The Edith Anisfield Wolf Fund provided a third of the funding to endow the Silver Chair in Judaic studies at what is now Case Western Reserve University in 1964 and gave $30,000 to the Western Reserve Historical Society in 1970 to start an archive dedicated to black history in Cleveland.
There is still so much more to know. When I visit her, sometimes I wonder if she would be annoyed by my prying. That is one of the questions I ask her when I visit, and I hope she would approve. I’m certain she would speak up if she didn’t. The July 14, 1943 announcement in the Plain Dealer on her election to the Board of the CPL described her thusly: “Mrs. Wolf is by nature conciliatory and soft-spoken, but she manages to have her way.”
Lisa Nielson is an Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She has a PhD in historical musicology, with a specialization in Women’s Studies, and teaches seminars on the harem, slavery and courtesans.
Photographer, filmmaker, poet and novelist Gordon Parks died in 2006 at the age of 93. But the 1998 winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for lifetime achievement continues to exert a centrifugal force on American culture, well into the 21st century.
Kendrick Lamar sampled Parks’ photographs for his music video “Element.” And a mesmerizing art exhibit, concentrating on Parks’ first decade of visual work, is now open to all at the Cleveland Museum of Art through June 30. There is no admissions charge.
The National Gallery of Art curated “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950.” It features many iconic images, perhaps none more arresting than Ella Watson in 1942 in a polka-dot dress, a charwoman who cleaned government buildings in Washington, D.C. She stands before a flag, with her mop and broom inverted. Much later Parks retitled the portrait “American Gothic.”
The photographer gives the viewer context, depicting Watson’s family, religious life and neighborhood in his first extended photo story, a craft he would hone becoming one of Life Magazine’s most important photo-essayists.
The exhibit features Langston Hughes in Chicago in 1941 in a somber door-and-window portrait taken during the Chicago Black Arts Renaissance, and Ingrid Bergman appearing haunted in Italy. The collection includes fashion shots and Tuskegee Airmen and a 17-year-old Harlem gang leader named “Red” whose gravitas and charisma translate across decades.
“I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all kinds of wrongs,” Parks famously wrote in 1999. “I knew at that point I had to have a camera.”
Museum-goers will have the chance to consider Parks and his creations in a Salon Talk at 7 p.m. Friday, May 24 at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Professor Gillian Johns of Oberlin College, Daniel Gray-Kontar, executive director of Twelve Literary Arts, and Tonika Johnson, a Chicago activist and photographer, will reflect on Parks’ genius and his ongoing relevance today.
Sophomore Elizabeth Metz was dismayed by students at Beachwood High School arguing whether slavery or the Holocaust was worse. Administrators say her student-led forums have improved campus race relations more than faculty and staff have been able to do.
Senior Jalen Brown saw the toxic mix of homophobia and racism in the hallways of the Cleveland School of Science and Medicine. He formed a student cadre called “Specific and General Acceptance” to explore this intersection. One of their goals: fewer suicides.
Senior Kye Harrell led a silent sit-in at Shaker Heights High School, gathering more than 400 protestors on the day of the nationwide Parkland demonstrations. They made visible the discrepancy between high school roadblocks to Black Lives Matter participation and the school’s green-light for the Parkland rally.
And sophomore Karson Baldwin founded a strong, ongoing alliance between the International Newcomers Academy in Cleveland and students from his institution, University School, under the banner “Oné Respé,” a Haitian greeting meaning “honor and respect.”
These four leaders took a bow for their activism, singled out by the Princeton Prize for Race Relations. It rewards anti-racist enterprise rather than the more staid student essay contests.
“At a time when racial hatred threatens to turn into an American export, the winners of the Princeton Prize focus on harmony, respect, and community to advance race relations,” said Sandhya Gupta, who chairs the Cleveland regional competition.
Princeton graduate Henry Von Kohorn founded the prize in 2003 partly out of his disappointment in his alma mater’s record in attracting students of color. Led by Princeton alumni, it grew from a pilot in Boston and Washington D.C. to 27 regional competitions, which culminate in a spring symposium at Princeton for the winners. Karson Baldwin, who represented Cleveland, was one of only two sophomores among the honorees this year.
He quoted Joe Cimperman of Global Cleveland who believes the biggest deficit humanity suffers is the one in kindness and compassion.
Danny Williams, president and CEO of Eliza Bryant Village, gave a witty keynote to honor the quartet in Cleveland. He put up diagrams captioned “This is Your Brain” and “This is Your Brain on Social Justice,” with the portions associated with empathy enlarged.
“Once you have taken that red pill,” he said smiling, “you are going to find it hard to un-ring that bell.” And he quoted Allen Kay: “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
But the evening’s award ceremony at the Hawken School’s Gries Center in University Circle belonged to the four honorees. Elizabeth Metz started her “Breaking Barriers Project” at Beachwood High School, in the wake of the Tree of Life shootings and the racist killings of two black people in a western Kentucky Kroger on the same October weekend.
She used the fear of gun violence to unite factions at her school who were adding racist captions about lynching to Instagram and characterizing students with families from the Middle East as terrorists. The first forum attracted 40 students; the second 150.
Jalen Brown characterized his work as “changing lives and saving them.”
“In America, being black is difficult, insanely difficult,” he said. “Black Americans are not allowed to wear their hoods up and walk down the street. And dealing with the homophobia inside a community dealing with racism is more than most can bear.”
Jalen Brown led a moment of silence for Nigel Shelby, a gay Alabama youth who killed himself April 18. “I was where he was at the age of 15.”
I was five when I came to the U.S. from China. My first experiences of America were formed in a predominantly white town where I could count the number of non-white classmates on one hand. Other children asked me why my eyes were so small, whether I ate dogs, and why my lunch of homemade dumplings smelled weird. I chose to bury these memories because I wanted to believe the world was a better place.
“The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too.” That observation comes from Chimamanda Adichie’s short story, “The Thing Around My Neck.” I discovered it in a first-year seminar at Case Western Reserve University, an experience that helped awaken me to the power in sharing things that make us uncomfortable.
As the class progressed, I found comfort in being both Chinese and American. Zadie Smith writes in “Speaking in Tongues” of her “proper” English: “This voice I speak with these days, this English voice with its rounded vowels and consonants in more or less the right place–this is not the voice of my childhood…A braver person, perhaps, would have stood firm, teaching her peers a useful lesson by example: not all lettered people need be of the same class, nor speak identically. I went the other way. Partly out of cowardice and a constitutional eagerness to please.” The seminar discussions made me feel less alone in my immigrant experiences; they also allowed me to face the more difficult feelings I’ve had. The things around my neck that make me different aren’t exclusionary, even if they may seem that way at first. I started to see new connections. The Anisfield-Wolf seminar, taught by Dr. Lisa Nielson, fostered the importance of difference and diverse stories. I started to write more about the need for Asian-American writers and stories in the media. I found purpose in writing and strength in multifaceted identities.
In talking about the readings in class, I realized that discussions about race and identity were pursuable once someone brought light to them, even if these questions were hard to explore. It changed the way I approached my Asian-American identity and the topics I address. I found power in owning the negative memories, admitting that they happened and starting a dialogue about the experiences. I am now six years removed from that seminar and a graduate of Case, currently in medical school. Still, the themes of these two readings from that class accompany me. I didn’t have to be less Chinese to be more American. Now I find comfort, despite the confusion, in the hyphen that exists in Chinese-American.
Jessica Yang was one of the members of the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf SAGES seminar in 2013. She graduated from CWRU in 2017 with a dual degree in biochemistry and psychology, and a minor in biology. An avid reader who is dedicated to exploring questions of identity, Jessica has been a blogger and freelance writer since high school and is currently finishing her first year of medical school at Rowan University in New Jersey.
David W. Blight and Brent Staples – two Anisfield-Wolf Book Award recipients – discovered this week that each had won a Pulitzer Prize.
Two more Anisfield-Wolf winners were named as Pulitzer finalists: novelist Tommy Orange, this year’s fiction winner for his debut, “There There” and historian Jill Lepore, who won an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 2006, a finalist in criticism for her writing in the New Yorker.
Three historians selected the Douglass biography: Annette Gordon-Reed, Tiya Miles and Marcus Rediker. Gordon-Reed, who chaired the jury, has her own Anisfield-Wolf prize for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a 2009 winner that excavated the suppressed record of Thomas Jefferson’s black family.
Staples cites Gordon-Reed in one column the Pulitzer judges singled out: “The Legacy of Monticello’s First Black Family,” published July 4, 2018. And he quotes Frederick Douglass in another, “The Racism Behind Women’s Suffrage.”
The Pulitzer elevated Stapes, 68, for his “editorials written with extraordinary moral clarity that charted the racial fault lines in the United States at a polarizing moment in the nation’s history.” He received an Anisfield-Wolf award in 1995 for his memoir, “Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White.”
Frederick Douglass, a reader suspects, also might have lauded Gordon-Reed’s work. Blight emphasizes that Douglass – the most photographed American of the 19th century – existed as a man of words.
David W. Blight, 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner
The historian, 70, described this book as “the biography of a voice.” A Yale University professor, Blight believes Douglass’ speeches and constant travel also made him the most heard individual of his century.
The Pulitzer jury called the biography “a breathtaking history that demonstrates the scope of Frederick Douglass’ influence through deep research on his writings, intellectual evolution and his relationships.” Blight won an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 2012 for “American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.”
Blight states that the former slave’s great gift “is that he found ways to convert the scars Covey [a slave master] left on his body into words that might change the world. His travail under Covey’s yoke became Douglass’ crucifixion and resurrection.”
The Biblical language is intentional – Douglass embraced a personal Christianity as a teenager in Baltimore, studying sermons as templates for his oratory. He escaped bondage at 20, and lived nine years a fugitive until his freedom was purchased.
“Never trust anyone who writes three autobiographies – they are manipulating you on every page,” Blight said wryly of Douglass at the Virginia Festival of the Book. He credited the collection of Savannah surgeon Walter O. Evans, who saved ten Douglass family scrapbooks, with making his book possible.
I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise
Eighteen months after the Unite the Right racist violence wracked Charlottesville, the 25th anniversary of the Virginia Festival of the Book gathered thousands of thoughtful citizens and served as one way to gauge the civic temperature.
That temperature was decidedly warm among poet Rita Dove and novelists Esi Edugyan and John Edgar Wideman, the trio who closed the festival with their session, “A World Built On Bondage: Racism and Human Diversity in Award-Winning Fiction.” It was the second consecutive year the festival culminated in an Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards panel.
“Esi is a wonder,” Dove effused when introducing Edugyan, whose latest novel Washington Black weaves a tale of freedom and adventure told through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy of the same name. He begins his life in slavery on a Barbadian sugar plantation in the early 19th century. Edugyan received the Anisfield-Wolf award for fiction in 2012 for Half Blood Blues, a historical novel set to jazz in the folds of World War I and II. The former United States Poet Laureate then turned to Wideman and told the audience, “I can’t remember a time — in my adult life — when I haven’t been accompanied by John’s work.” The 77-year-old nodded his head slightly as Dove rattled off his accomplishments, including a Rhodes scholarship, a MacArthur “genius” grant, all Ivy-League basketball player and an Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement prize in 2011.
The esteemed panel spoke of beginnings and how the path toward success often creates a chasm between where you’ve been and where you’re headed. For Wideman, that divide began as a basketball player on the high school varsity team, a pursuit that eventually led him to the University of Pennsylvania and away from his Pittsburgh roots. “I felt quietly that I needed that,” Wideman said. “At home it was a world of women – my grandmother, mother, her friends. I loved it, but I wasn’t active in that world. I was listening. But I knew there was a different world for men . . . Where was that men’s world?”
He found that men’s world — rowdy, instructive — through sports. “Doing the things that made me successful in the world outside of my family was absolutely stepping away from that family,” Wideman said. “I could not sort that out, so I just pretended most of the time that it wasn’t happening. I blinded myself to it.”
That sort of isolation from one’s community presented itself as more of a cultural struggle for Edugyan, the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants who settled in Calgary, Alberta, the Canadian interior.
“I’m attracted to stories of people who are on the margins,” Edugyan, 41, said. “This comes out of my own history growing up a black woman in the prairies, in Alberta. Being born in Calgary, in the late 70s, where the black population has never been more than three percent.”
That dearth of community translated into her art: “I grew up with a huge feeling of isolation and almost of not having a community in that sense, and being sort of a constant outsider as I’m making my way through the world . . . That’s always been why I’m attracted to stories that are footnotes in the larger history . . . things that are sitting on the margins and looking at events through those eyes.”
Does writing feel like home? Dove asked. “Books opened the doors to feeling at home in the world,” Edugyan replied. “You learn that others, people who are totally unlike yourself, are going through the same thing, feeling the same emotions. There’s a great comfort in that.”
Wideman noted that his ease with writing ebbs and flows. But above all, he told the audience, language is art.
“Nobody owns the language,” he said. “Language is entirely invent-able by each one of you, each one of us, the language is a collective phenomenon. . . That’s what I hope to prove to people like myself: You own the world. It belongs to you. Language is an instrument. Language dances. It dreams. It contains silence.”
When it came to the power of the written word to offer a reprieve from the current news cycle and political climate, both authors had their reservations.
“Literature doesn’t solve problems,” Wideman told the audience. “Literature is the opportunity to think about problems, to invent in one’s own mind, and try to invent in other minds, a different world.”
“There’s no magic bullet novel that’s going to solve all our problems,” Edugyan quipped. “Empathy is important because we’re living in age right now where nobody is listening to anybody else. . . We need to engage with lives and experiences that are totally different from what we are going through ourselves. That’s the only way we can mark a path forward.”
When one white man in the audience asked Edugyan if buying a copy of Washington Black “would count as reparations,” the crowded auditorium sat silent for a few moments amid the pointedness of his insult.
Edugyan called it a terrible question, but she nonetheless answered it.
“One thing you might get – having walked with this young slave boy for six years, totally unlike yourself – is empathy,” she said. “You might feel something for him. Maybe it doesn’t change the greater world, this experience of empathy, but it offers something so rare, the experiences of someone totally different.”
Jericho Brown recreates the cover of The Tradition. Photo by Brian Cornelius. Artwork by Lauren “Ralphi” Burgess.
The cover of Jericho Brown’s new poetry collection, The Tradition, features a young black boy, perhaps 10 years old, surrounded in a lush field of flowers, ocean waves at his back.
It’s beauty is evident, but it intimidated Brown when he first saw it. “It’s so gorgeous and it does speak directly to the poems,” he told The Rumpus. “I kept wondering, “Are these poems good enough for this goddamn cover?”
Let that answer be an emphatic yes.
This work, stitched together over 51 poems, is a meditation on grief, violence, fatherhood, trauma, sexuality and beauty. The Tradition is his third book, the follow-up to 2014’s The New Testament, which won the Anisfield-Wolf award in poetry.
For this new book, Brown laments the pain of heartbreak, family erosion, gun violence, and self-exploration.In “Riddle,” he sneers at white supremacy, evoking the wail of Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, as the vocalization of its destruction: We do not know the history/Of this nation in ourselves. We/Do not know the history of our/Selves on this planet because/We do not have to know what/We believe we own.
He plays with religion and racism in “Stake,” which begins: I am a they in most of America/Someone who feels lost in the forest/Of we, so he can’t imagine/A single tree. He can’t bear it.
In The Tradition, Brown centers what he calls “the duplex,” a new poetry form he originated that “guts the sonnet” and experiments with structure over 7 couplets, beginning and ending with the same line. The first of these poems appears in the first section and builds tension over its 14 lines:
A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own.
Memory makes demands darker than my own: My last love drove a burgundy car.
My first love drove a burgundy car. He was fast and awful, tall as my father.
Steadfast and awful, my tall father Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.
Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark Like the sound of a mother weeping again.
Like the sound of my mother weeping again, No sound beating ends where it began.
None of the beaten end up how we began. A poem is a gesture toward home.
“[The sonnet’s] been pushed down my throat the entirety of my life,” Brown said. “There is something in me that doesn’t like that, and doesn’t trust that, because I’m a rebellious human being. I need to be a rebellious human being because I’m black and gay in this nation and in this world which has not been good to me or anybody like me.”
Each section of The Tradition draws readers forward, hungrily. The pacing is intentional, though it’s still hard to catch your breath. It’s an intimate collection that prides itself on its vulnerability. Readers who pick up a copy will be awed, from cover to closing stanza.
“As a kid in Israel, my dream was to become a psychoanalyst and a filmmaker,” Ofra Bloch said in a telephone interview from her home in New York City. “Later on, I became a psychoanalyst but I never dared to go to filmmaking school. So when I decided to make a film, it was sheer chutzpah because I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have any technical skills. But I knew what I wanted to see.”
Her clear vision led her to make “Afterward,” a new documentary that explores the lingering and cross-cutting trauma embedded in generations of Germans, Israelis and Palestinians. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards is sponsoring two screenings at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
Six years ago, when Bloch, 69, began working on her first full length feature, she intended to center her lens on the lingering generational trauma among German non-Jews and second and third generations of decedents of Holocaust perpetrators. After the director left Germany, however, she realized she had an incomplete story.
Growing up in Israel, “you can’t avoid trauma. It’s always present,” she said. Living through wars and under the long shadow of the Holocaust, Bloch was raised to fear and hate both Germans and Palestinians. She needed to include the Palestinian account of trauma and reckoning in her film. After completing the interviews and beginning the editing process, she recognized there was one more layer to uncover: she couldn’t tell either story without embedding hers as well. The triad of viewpoints would complete the narrative.
“I connect them,” Bloch said. “There’s no way those stories can exist, floating, without the presence of the interviewer, me the Israeli. During those interviews in both places, memories started surfacing. I had recurrent dreams that were coming out of nowhere, just by the act of immersing myself in the lives of these people. [My experience] became such an integral part — the glue of the film.”
In that way, her documentary resembles “My Promised Land,” Ari Shavit’s examination of the Israeli creation story along his own family tree, with room for ruminating on the 1948 destruction of Palestinian family trees in the Lydda Valley.
“We’re not exactly in the same place ideologically but [our work] complements each other,” Bloch said of Shavit. “He’s really trying to examine the intricacies of the Israeli society, in the past and the present. It’s really a perfect pairing, in that way.” Shavit’s book won the Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction prize in 2014.
With such a strong personal reaction to her subjects, Bloch determined she should approach the interviews with the objectivity of a therapist.
“As a filmmaker, I had to learn to just listen to people, to do what I do in the office as a psychoanalyst,” she said. “Which means to be very present, without judgment, without necessarily agreeing with what people were saying to me. To give people the space to talk about their experience. When people are able to share that, it creates a dialogue. Without listening to the ‘other,’ without active listening, there is no movement toward any solution.”
She leaned on those therapist skills when interviewing Palestinian activist Bassam Aramin, who in 2005 co-founded Combatants for Peace, a grassroots coalition of Israeli and Palestinian activists working together to stop the violence. But two years later, his 10-year-old daughter Abir was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier while she stood outside of school. Bloch marveled at Aramin’s ability to remain focused on the mission and to honor his daughter’s legacy in his non-violent work. “It taught me that pain is just pain,” she said. “It doesn’t have a nationality.”
During the interview with Aramin, they visited one of the playgrounds that Combatants for Peace built in Abir’s honor. There Bloch had her moment of reckoning.
“Even though I lived in the U.S. for 39 years, I am complicit in some way,” she said. “Being an Israeli, I am part of the problem. I believe this is the reason I made this film….Six years of work and energy and funding, because this is my little contribution toward resolution of the conflict.”
Moviegoers can watch “Afterward” at one of two screenings: Saturday, March 30 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, March 31 at 12:05 p.m. Tickets are $14 for film festival members, seniors and students; $16 for others. Receive a $1 discount at the box office, online or ordering on the phone, by using the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards code: ANWO.
Leila Chatti worked six years to create Deluge, 52 poems that the esteemed Copper Canyon Press will publish next year as her first book.
Michael Wiegers, editor of the press that publishes Jericho Brown, C.D. Wright and W.S. Merwin, called Chatti in March to give her the news.
“I’ve been happy-crying for the past hour driving to the prison I teach at – I’m so very, very excited to say my first book, DELUGE, is going to be published with @CopperCanyonPrs,” Chatti tweeted. “This feels like the best dream. I am so wildly grateful. Praise to God in all things.”
Faith is a strand that weaves through her first two chapbooks and rises in Deluge. Chatti, 28, is the daughter of a Muslim father and a Catholic mother. When her father heard that the Copper Canyon editor — whom his daughter has met just once at a brunch as a 22-year-old student in North Carolina — had selected her manuscript, he saw that brief introduction as fate.
“Deluge pronounced itself from the start as a book with a bold vision, unafraid to wrestle faith, myth, embodiment and multiple taboos,” Wiegers wrote in an email interview. “In several poems Chatti imagines the Virgin Mary as a mother, very physically, and painfully giving birth, and contrasts this personal elsewhere with her own body, blood, pain, and belief. It’s a sometimes startling, often vulnerable, seldom blinking debut collection that marks her as a promising talent whose artistry will continue to reveal itself.
“This is a very special book by a dedicated and talented poet. We’re thrilled to bring her poems to a larger readership.”
Chatti grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, a citizen of both the United States and Tunisia. She is midway through her two-year Anisfield-Wolf fellowship in writing and publishing at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. The editing, she said, is already influencing her, liberating the form on the page of some of her newest poems.
“Deluge is the title of two poems in the manuscript,” Chatti said in an interview. “The book is about my illness in my early twenties when I had a number of uterine tumors. For about 2 ½ to three years I was dealing with that. I was dealing with oncologists. One of the first symptoms I had was hemorrhaging, and when I went to the hospital, they referred to it as a flood. This was one of the most humiliating symptoms, and I bled for almost three years. Because I was brought up in a religious household, I thought about the flood, which was used by God as punishment.
“And that was very much how I felt, that I was being punished by doing something wrong, namely living with a partner unmarried. This was my sin, a specific kind of flood. Deluge is the Biblical term for flood.”
As Wiegers mentions, several poems dwell with Mary, a central figure in both Christianity and Islam, the only woman named in Qur’an.
“I consider Mary as my co-pilot in this book,” Chatti said. “She is extremely present in this book. Several of the poems are called ‘Annunciation.’ I am very interested in Mary from birth to the moment she gives birth to Jesus, Mary as Mary, Mary as a girl of 14. When I was sick, I was thinking a lot about fertility and chastity . . . I was very interested in this idea of Mary the human, faced with this massive imposition on her body.”
When Ploughshares published “Confession,” poetry judge Marianne Boruch wrote that Chatti “managed to both honor and upset convention in a most kickass-lively way. The sheer nerve and wit of what’s said – the whole piece feels wonderfully spoken.”
Here is Confession:
“Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.”
—Mary giving birth, The Holy Qur’an
Truth be told, I like Mary a little better
when I imagine her like this, crouched
and cursing, a boy-God pushing on
her cervix (I like remembering
she had a cervix, her body ordinary
and so like mine), girl-sweat lacing
rivulets like veins in the sand,
her small hands on her knees
not doves but hands, gripping,
a palm pressed to her spine, fronds
whispering like voyeurs overhead—
(oh Mary, like a God, I too take pleasure
in knowing you were not all
holy, that ache could undo you
like a knot)—and, suffering,
I admire this girl who cared
for a moment not about God
or His plans but her own
distinct life, this fiercer Mary who’d disappear
if it saved her, who’d howl to Hell
with salvation if it meant this pain,
the blessed adolescent who squatted
indignant in a desert, bearing His child
like a secret she never wanted to hear.
By Gabrielle Bychowski
How do we talk about racism? How do we talk about sexism? These were two of the questions that initiated the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award seminar at Case Western Reserve University.
The goal was not only to help facilitate talk about racism and sexism but also to study the ways in which this talk already occurs. Students were challenged to analyze and deconstruct the grammar and rhetoric of white supremacy: What are the images created and repeated? How are sentences structured to lead readers or listeners to certain conclusions? What are the nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives that act as dog whistles for attentive audiences?
The thesis of our seminar was that Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners could help answer the questions posed on racism and sexism. We began the semester with the 2018 award winning authors in preparation for attending the awards ceremony in late September. In those weeks, students considered how the poetry of Shane McCrae (captured in In the Language of My Captor) taught readers how language bends and twists in order to reflect the tension between hate and love, captor and captive, identity and society.
Next, the students weighed the importance of truth and hoax through Kevin Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. This text seriously engages what it means to be a “nonfiction” book in an era where various authors try to blur the line between fact and fiction, especially as it applies to the construction, exploitation and oppression of racial identities.
The fiction award winner, Sing Unburied Sing, written by Jesmyn Ward, demonstrates for students the ways that fiction can be used to speak of unspeakable traumas and embodied truths that are too often left dismissively abstract. The majority of the class attended the award ceremony, which was critical to bringing the texts alive in new ways by introducing the classroom readers to the book’s writers.
Beyond the 2018 winners, the seminar invited the class to read important Anisfield-Wolf texts that take different perspectives on the questions and language of racism. Books by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X began the analysis of the Civil Rights Movement, a scope which we expanded to consider the women of the civil rights movement as well. Books like Hidden Figures and The Gay Revolution filled in this picture in part, as well as additional texts such as This Bridge Called My Back, Sister Outsider, and the writings of Angela Davis.
These women writers gave insights into the ways that women were hard at work in the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the distinct ways sexism was compounded with the racist rhetoric of white supremacy. Indeed, by adding the lens of gender, the reading of King and Malcolm X prompted students to consider how being heterosexual cisgender men of faith may have influenced the way in which these leaders encountered the world.
As a scholar and instructor of Anisfield-Wolf award-winning books, I am honored to introduce students at Case Western Reserve University to the canon of books that each respond to the questions of how we talk about racism and sexism. In the last couple of years, the class has been in high demand with spots filling up quickly. There is always an extensive waitlist.
On the first day, I hear about what brings the students to the seminar and to the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award archive. Some students come already invested in social justice, racial equity, and feminism. Other students come to the class admitting that they come from places where racism and sexism is rampant but discussing either is discouraged. In each case, I take my job seriously: to meet students where they are, equip them with critical tools and books, and bring them into the ongoing discourse the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards has promoted.
One student, Kami Mukenschnabl, wrote, “Reading and discussing award winners from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards has been extremely interesting and eye-opening. Coming into this class, I was not very familiar with cultural ideas and ideas of gender and race that differ from my own….By reading and discussing these books, I have learned how to read, reflect, and discuss the difficult, yet important, topics that these books bring up.”
By the end of the semester, I hear a myriad of ways that students now feel not only better trained to engage these conversations and activism but also feel connected to a wider community that these books have generated. For these reasons and more, I am grateful to see these students and the A-W community grow one year and one seminar at a time.
Gabrielle Bychowski is an Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University, teaching courses on transgender and intersex history, disability culture, racism, and medieval literature. This post originally appeared on her blog, Things Transform.
She extended appreciation to her husband first, with a jaunty, “Thank you so much to Nick Laird, for sharing so much with me, willingly and unwillingly, including the title of his poetry book Feel Free, which I would also like to apologize to for stealing.”
The book is a lively, capacious and learned romp through five sections that explore freedom of language and thought: “In the World,” “In the Audience,” “In the Gallery,” “On the Bookshelf and “Feel Free.” Smith, a 43-year-old Londoner, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006 for On Beauty, a witty story of an interracial family living in an American university town astraddle multiple cultural fault lines.
Critic Charles Finch, who championed the essay collection at the NBCC, praised Smith’s critical comfort with uncertainty. He wrote: “If, as the famous line from the famous book goes, personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then perhaps so is great criticism. Feel Free is a collection of essays, reviews, vignettes, and profiles by Zadie Smith, and it might so easily, like other books of its kind, ultimately feel like an arbitrary collocation of unrelated ephemera, a patchwork of unrelated scraps. Or in more cynical terms: a money grab. But it doesn’t!”
Finch praised how the essayist rotates with aplomb through the art of Jay-Z, J.G. Ballard and Justin Bieber, more appreciative than harsh.
Smith, who wore her trademark turban and trousers to the stage, ended her short acceptance remarks with an appreciation of Robert B. Silvers, the late editor at the New York Review of Books, for whom she wrote many of the essays in her book.
“He was a model of rigor, clarity and engagement,” Smith said. “He made you a better writer deletion by deletion, query by query. The first essay I ever wrote for him was about Kafka. And a line from ‘The Judgment’ always reminds me of him. It’s the bit when the father leaps up out of bed and says to his son, ‘Now you know what existed outside of you. Before you were only aware of yourself.’ Bob knew how to prompt writers, easily some of the most narcissistic people on earth.”
That line prompted a wave of slightly uncomfortable chuckles from the audience at the New School in Manhattan.
Other winners this year were Nora Krug’s provocative and searching graphic memoir, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home; Anna Burn’s Milkman, a novel set amid the Irish troubles, already crowned with a Booker prize; Christopher Bananos’ erudite biography Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous; Ada Limon’s poetry book The Carrying that celebrates her mother, and Steve Coll’s probing, definitive and multi-year investigative nonfiction, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Join us for the Cleveland premiere of “Afterward,” a 94-minute documentary from Jerusalem-born psychoanalyst Ofra Bloch that explores the lingering and cross-cutting trauma embedded in generations of Germans, Israelis and Palestinians. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards is sponsoring the film at this year’s Cleveland International Film Festival.
Bloch, who lives in New York City, began making the documentary intending to focus on the second and third-generation descendants of the perpetrators of the Holocaust, her attempt to shed hostility she carried against Germans as a people.
After filming began, however, she recognized her own prejudices – especially against Palestinians, a group she was raised to hate — were preventing her from telling the full story. She expanded her scope to include sit-down interviews with Palestinian men and women, including a professor who lost his position for taking students to Auschwitz. These testimonies give viewers a perspective on generational wounds stretching back to the 1948 Nakba, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in the creation of Israel.
“The film points towards a future — an ‘afterward’ — that attempts to live with the truths of history in order to make sense of the present,” Bloch said in an interview. “My wish is that at the conclusion of ‘Afterward’ viewers will see how easy it is to move from a mindset of a victim to that of a perpetrator. ‘Evil,’ for lack of a better word, can be unearthed in each of us given the ‘right’ conditions, regardless of our religious or ethnic background.”
Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer-winner for his investigative book “The Looming Tower,” called Bloch’s documentary “a brilliant personal exploration of the psychological obstacles to peace in the Middle East, and the tectonic plates of history that have brought two peoples to this tragic impasse.”
Tickets are $14 for film festival members, seniors and students; $16 for others. Moviegoers can receive a $1 discount at the box office, online or ordering on the phone, by using the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards code: ANWO.
