“John Woman,” the newest novel from prolific and philosophical Walter Mosley, arrives today telling the story of a fugitive genius.
It begins with Shakespeare’s Sonnet XVII – “Who will believe my verse in time to come” – and ends 36 chapters later with a mystery, its central character missing. Detectives find blood of more than one type on a New York City park bench.
In between is the story of a character born Cornelius Jones, the son of an Italian-American sensualist and an older, self-taught black intellectual. The novel opens as Lucia Napoli is describing her youthful wanton desires to her 12-year-old son, whom she calls CC. The boy mostly lives with his father Herman, a silent film projectionist in New York’s East Village. As Herman’s health fails, Cornelius takes over the job.
Five years later, father near death and mother in the wind, Cornelius becomes entangled in a murder and reinvents himself as John Woman. Brilliant in the classroom, he launches an intellectual movement – centered in Herman’s ideas — that grapples with the slipperiness of history. John Woman prospers, holding forth and breaking rules at a fictional southwestern American university.
Mosley, who studied political theory, is drawn to the difficulty of knowing history. “When I decided to write about this phenomenon I did so by constructing the novel of ideas – ‘John Woman’ (Grove Atlantic, 377 pp, $26),” he says.
“Understanding that this was to be a novel and not a treatise I gave my character a history in which he committed a crime that had to be hidden. There is no mystery about who committed the murder. There is no detective that solves a crime. Indeed, the reader might feel that no crime has been committed. ‘John Woman’ is a study of a man who stalks a prey (history) that is at the same time tracking him.”
Mosley spent nearly 20 years thinking about this novel. He described his own father, Leroy, who was a supervisory custodian in the Los Angeles Public Schools, as a “Black Socrates.” His mother, Ella Slatkin Mosley, was a Jewish clerk whose ancestors emigrated from Russia. In 1951, the state of California refused to issue the couple a marriage certificate. Their only child was born the next year.
Young Walter grew up in Los Angeles and wrote dozens of critically acclaimed novels, translated into some 25 languages. He is celebrated for his Easy Rawlins stories, and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1998 for “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned,” detective fiction also set in tough South Central Los Angeles.
“Though I am known as a mystery writer that genre has never been the only expression of my writing career,” Mosley says in the publicity materials for his new novel. “I have published over 55 books since 1990. Less than half of these have been mysteries.
“I write books to fit the story and the subject I’m interested in. And so when I wanted to tell a tale about the blues and the bluesman Robert Johnson I wrote the literary novel ‘RL’s Dream’ in which Mr. Johnson served as the negative space. When I felt pressed to write about the impact and the internal struggle of dementia I wrote ‘The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.’”
Mosley, 66, has lived in New York City since 1981. “John Woman” begins and ends in that town, full of moral complexity even as its 377 propulsive pages fly along. Its author describes it as a political novel.
The third annual Cleveland Book Week runs this year from Sept. 21-29, and will celebrate present and past Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winners, while offering a number of free literary and literacy themed events for the community. The series of events is anchored by the sold out 83rd annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony, scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 27 in the State Theatre at Playhouse Square. This year’s winners are:
Shane McCrae,In the Language of My Captor, Poetry
N. Scott Momaday, Lifetime Achievement
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Fiction
Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, Nonfiction
Local literacy advocate Margo Hudson will be the featured speaker for September’s Creative Mornings gathering. For its theme of “chaos,” Hudson will share about that phenomena in terms of literacy, and her work moving herself and others away from illiteracy.
Hudson earned her GED® in 2012 from Seeds of Literacy. She spent 11 years studying and took the test 6 times before passing. Margo now serves as a tutor at Seeds, helping other students achieve their literacy goals. In a city where two of every three Clevelanders read at the seventh-grade level or below, her work is immensely valuable.
In 2016, she was named National Adult Learner of the Year and received Governor Kasich’s Courage Award. That same year, she led the Pledge of Allegiance at a session of the Republican National Convention. In 2017, Cleveland Magazine named Margo one of Cleveland’s Most Interesting People, and she is a 2018 Cleveland Foundation Place Maker. She now speaks to community groups and nonprofits about how literacy changed her life.
Paul Beatty: Writers & Readers
Saturday, September 22
2 p.m.
Cleveland Public Library, Main Library – Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium
FREE EVENT: Registration not required
Paul Beatty visits Cleveland Public Library as part of its Writers & Readers Series, presented in partnership with Literary Cleveland. His 2015 novel The Sellout made him the first American to win the Man Booker Prize in Fiction and earned the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction. The novelist, in his own words, set out to see if he could make himself flinch, writing a scathing satire about reinstating slavery on a present-day farm in southern California. He is also the author of The White Boy Shuffle, Tuff, Slumberland and two works of poetry.
Shane McCrae: In the Language of My Captor
(2018 AWBA Poetry Winner)
Tuesday, September 25
5:30 p.m.
Shane McCrae interrogates history and perspective with his fifth book, In the Language of My Captor, including the connections between racism and love. He uses historical persona poems and prose memoir to address the illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. This evening of poetry, music, and art is presented by Twelve Literary Arts and Karamu House.
Photo courtesy of Brews & Prose
A. Van Jordan at Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities
(2005 AWBA Poetry Winner, M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A)
Wednesday, September 26
5 p.m. Harkness Chapel, Case Western Reserve University
Join poet A. Van Jordan, 2005 Anisfield-Wolf winner for M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A, and Ohio Poet Laureate Dave Lucas for conversation and recitation. Jordan uses multiple voices and approaches to portray MacNolia Cox, an Akron girl who became the first black finalist in the National Spelling Bee Competition. His poems draw on blues, jazz and prose stylings to depict the Depression and mid-century racism, two elements that framed life in 1936.
AW Salon: Steven Pinker and Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Enlightenment Now
Wednesday, September 26
5:30 p.m.
Anisfield-Wolf jurist Steven Pinker set out, first in his acclaimed The Better Angels of Our Nature, and this year in the follow-up bestseller Enlightenment Now, to illustrate that there has never been a better time to be a human being. Join us for a unique, intimate, and intriguing conversation around this and other topics between Pinker and Anisfield-Wolf Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. – friends and Harvard University professors.
[SOLD OUT] Writers Center Stage – Judy Blume
Wednesday, September 26
7:30 p.m.
The Milton and Tamar Maltz Performing Arts Center
TICKETS: By subscription only – single event tickets are $30 and go on sale Monday, Aug. 20 at 9 a.m.
The William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage Series kicks off this year with Judy Blume, one of the world’s most beloved authors. Her books have sold more than 85 million copies in 32 languages, becoming a touchstone for generations of young readers. The program includes a Q&A and book signing.
83rd Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards – SOLD OUT
Thursday, September 27
6 p.m.
State Theatre, Playhouse Square
Watch the ceremony live via webstream here at www.anisfield-wolf.org.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity. It remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and equity. For more than 80 years, the distinguished books earning Anisfield-Wolf prizes have opened and challenged our minds.
The City Club of Cleveland Forum: N. Scott Momaday
(2018 AWBA Lifetime Achievement Winner)
Friday, September 28
Noon
N. Scott Momaday remade American literature in 1966 with his first novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning House Made of Dawn. Anisfield-Wolf Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. says Momaday “is at root a storyteller who both preserves and expands Native American culture in his critically praised, transformative writing.” He will discuss his life, his work, and take questions in the traditional City Club of Cleveland style.
Bunk and a Beer with Kevin Young
(2018 AWBA Nonfiction Winner, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News)
Friday, September 28
6 p.m.
Worthington Yards
Kevin Young is a public intellectual, the editor of eight books and the author of 13, including the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf winning Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. He spent six years researching and writing this cultural history of the covert American love of the con, and its entanglement with racial history. This event is co-sponsored by Brews + Prose.
Great Lakes Black Authors Expo & Writers Conference
Saturday, September 29, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Organized by Melanated Literary Heritage, Ltd., the Great Lakes Black Authors Expo and Writers Conference fosters literary education and publishing industry networking. Notable authors from all over the Great Lakes region, along with Keynote Speaker Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage, will convene and work towards developing a platform to recognize up-and-coming writers.
AW Family: Derrick Barnes and Gordon James on CROWN: An Ode to the Fresh Cut
Saturday, September 29
2 p.m.
Cleveland Public Library, Main Library – Louis Stokes Wing Auditorium
FREE EVENT: Registration not required
Joy, imagination, swagger and style animate Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, as a young black boy prepares to take on the world with a fresh cut. The author and illustrator share the story of their picture book, which earned Newbery and Caldecott Honors, Coretta Scott King Author and Illustrator Honors, the Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Honor, and a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators.
Solomon put a decade into researching and writing his magisterial book, centered in interviewing more than 300 families. It won the nonfiction Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2013. Far From the Tree explores the families of children who occupy a markedly different identity from their parents, with chapters on deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome and autism; on the families of prodigies; parents bringing up children conceived in rape; others whose children have committed serious crimes; and families with transgender children.
Converting Solomon’s 700-page text into a 93-minute film required some hard decisions. Early on, Rachel Dretzin, the film’s director, suggested a fresh slate of families, rather than the ones Solomon featured in his book. Writing in the New York Times, Solomon says he balked but then realized “their stories were by now too resolved for film, and we needed to depict the ambiguities and ambivalences of people still struggling to make sense of their lives.”
Solomon, 54, argues that both mediums have their nuances: where books are more definitive, films are more intimate. Books are girded in more context, with footnotes and indexes and bibliography, while watching the stories on film makes for “a less armored version of the truth.” In the movie, just six families tell this truth.
Amid them, Solomon found his transition from author to subject unsettling: “It felt weird to have my own story told in the film. Things I had been comfortable writing about in the privacy of my study made me anxious when shared on the screen.” Still, he reflects, he had asked the same of others.
Solomon wrote Far From the Tree “to champion a more tolerant and accepting society.” Six years later, the film is opening with far more urgency, amid a strained and difficult political climate.
“[The film] doesn’t preach with any particular righteousness,” Solomon writes, “but it inevitably speaks to the politics of this moment, and perhaps that’s a purpose better suited to a movie than to a book.”
The film opens July 20 in select theaters nationwide. Northeast Ohio residents will be able to catch the film at the Cedar Lee theater beginning August 24.
In 1970, Harvey Milk, a boisterous, restless New Yorker, turned 40 without a sense of having accomplished much. But in the handful of years that remained to him, Milk moved to San Francisco and remade American politics and identity.
Posthumously, his grin landed on a postage stamp, and the U.S. Navy, in which he served, is scheduled in 2021 to christen a logistics ship after him. Even before these two honors, Barack Obama in 2009 awarded Milk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, with a smile, “His name was Harvey Milk, and he was here to recruit us – all of us – to join a movement and change a nation.”
Obama was slyly riffing on Milk’s political catch-phrase – “I’m Harvey Milk and I’m here to recruit you!” – itself a clever subversion of the long-standing hysteria that gays sought to recruit straights into their beds.
But beneath these accumulating accolades was a complex man, writes historian Lillian Faderman in her elegant and informative new biography, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death.
In her opening sentence, Faderman calls him “charismatic, eloquent, a wit and a smart aleck,” who was “one of the first openly gay men to be elected to any political office anywhere.” A year before his 1978 assassination, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city’s legislative council.
Faderman, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2016 for The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, is well-positioned to contextualize Milk’s life, or, as she sees it, his many lives: a macho high-school jock, a Navy deep-sea diver, a high school math teacher, a Wall Street securities analyst who leafletted for Barry Goldwater, an actor, a hippie, an associate producer, a gofer for a Broadway celebrity, a businessman and in mid-life, a progressive politician.
“For Harvey, being in politics was much like being in the theater,” Faderman writes. “His old Broadway pal Tom O’Horgan understood that: ‘Harvey spent all his life looking for a stage,’ Tom would later say, “and when he moved to San Francisco, he found it.”
This biography, a crisp 283 pages, is the latest entry in the much-honored Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press. Faderman knits Milk’s Jewish identity – his grandfather was a Yiddish-speaking peddler who emigrated from Lithuania – with his politics on behalf of the oppressed, from championing rent control to San Francisco’s disinvestment from apartheid South Africa.
And like his contemporary Philip Roth, who grew up in a suburban section of Jewish Newark, Milk’s childhood in his mother’s kosher house on Long Island was marinated in American Jewish identity.
The same photo used on the postage stamp graces the cover of Faderman’s book. It shows Milk in 1977 standing outside his Castro Street camera store. His tie is flipping over in the breeze, a campaign button nestles on his tweed lapel, his eyes hooded, his smile jaunty and – viewed from this century – slightly beatific.
With her signature meticulous research, Faderman reconstructs Milk’s life through interviews, unpublished documents, letters and archives. In clean, declarative sentences, she paints a fascinating portrait of a man who had real enemies, real sadness and an irreverent joie de vivre.
When Milk and his partner Scott Smith signed a lease in 1973 on the spot for their camera store, they hung a placard in their Castro St. window: “We are VERY open.” In their apartment, Milk placed in the window a lavender-leafed Wandering Jew, a symbol that he and Smith had found a home.
Such details animate Faderman’s book. During Milk’s first quixotic run for the Board of Supervisors, “the San Francisco Examiner featured a picture of him that made him look like a weird cross between a hippie and a Hasid, with long sideburns that could be mistaken for peyas.”
Milk actually printed the word “soap” on a wooden box and held forth from atop it in a little plaza on Castro Street. Legendary newspaper columnist Herb Caen quipped that Milk “was running for Supervisor on the homo ticket, and I don’t mean homogenized.”
From these unpromising beginnings, Milk doggedly moved from the fringes to the center of municipal power. “His energy had no limit.”
As with “The Gay Revolution,” Faderman has provided the general reader a marvelous, new, definitive text, the first biography of Milk with footnotes. In a political era when the democratic institutions of the United States are stressed, it is illuminating to read a careful account of one complicated, flawed and exceptionally brave man who used them to advance justice.
A few months before fellow-Supervisor Dan White stalked and shot Milk dead, Harvey Milk made a tape recording. “If a bullet should enter my brain,” he said, “let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
Works by Langston Hughes, Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison will soon have a new place to call home.
All three authors have books housed in the Anisfield-Wolf collection at the downtown branch of the Cleveland Public Library, tucked away in the recesses of the second-floor special collections room. Now the collection, the only complete assemblage of all 83 years of Anisfield-Wolf-winning books, will be a showpiece of the new $10 million Martin Luther King Jr branch in University Circle. The canon contains almost 200 books and grows each year.
The New York-based firm SO-IL + Kurtz won the months-long design competition, funded by the Cleveland Foundation, to create a stylish, culturally significant proposal for a 21st-century branch of the Cleveland Public Library. The new 20,000-square-foot building will rise around the corner from the current location, a well-used community hub that was constructed just months after the assassination of the Civil Rights leader nearly 50 years ago.
The library would occupy the ground floor of a multi-story apartment building as part of the $300 million Circle Square development project, which will bring more retail and housing to the southern section of University Circle.
Each of the competing firms was instructed to incorporate King’s legacy into their proposals. SO-IL + Kurtz weaved elements from King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, crafting the center of the branch to create a raised “table of brotherhood.” The large, raised platform could be divided into areas for reading, homework and performances. The exterior adds a lush perimeter of greenery with bright columns abetting the natural light.
The Anisfield-Wolf collection will be a focal point at the top of a grand staircase, with the firm’s architects likening it to a “sculptural forest of ideas.” For the library patron, the hope is to mimic King’s notion of reaching “the mountaintop.”
“I am in awe of the three final designs for the Martin Luther King Jr. branch library, and captivated by the plans the library board chose — giving the neighborhood, the memory of Dr. King and the Anisfield-Wolf winning books a home unlike any other,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the book awards. “This new branch is suffused with beauty and innovation. May it be a destination for generations of readers.”
A Shout in the Ruins has a ring to it – both as a book and as a title that a poet would craft.
Novelist Kevin Powers spent six years writing his lyrical and violent story set in “the ruins” of Richmond, Virginia, the place where he was born and raised. The author anchors one narrative strand in the ruins of the Civil War; the second unspools 90 years later, during the ruins of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike construction that knocked apart the old Jackson Ward neighborhood of the city.
Readers can glimpse a thematic through-line from Powers’ fierce and luminous first book, The Yellow Birds, an elegiac story centered on a U.S. soldier named John Bartle returning from the Iraq war. It won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, as well as the PEN/Hemingway award.
“I will probably always be interested in the way that violence affects communities, how people respond to those sort of situations and how people put a life together when not all the pieces are intact,” Powers said in 2013 in Cleveland. As a teenager, he served as U.S. army gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq.
A Shout in the Ruins has a deep feel for blood-soaked Virginia. It becomes a multi-generational look at racism and intimacy in the context of war and ruin, American edition.
The story follows two couples: Rawls and Nurse, young people enslaved and in love, and their owners, Emily Reid Levallois and Antony Levallois, bound in marriage and unhappiness and treachery. Levallois is the region’s major landowner – his plantation is called Beauvais – and he sows menace in every direction.
As the book opens, Beauvais is burned, Emily either a ghost or an escapee from that place. The narrative scrolls backward to her midsummer birth, with Rawls as a little boy in the yard watching his mother rock the newborn, a “strange girl who would so influence the rest of his life.”
A few pages later, Rawls begins his nighttime courtship of Nurse, who asks him, “Why do you have a gait like a hobbled dog?” He shows her his feet, both big toes “docked,” or sliced off in childhood after he tried to escape. As the couple sits with this, “the common noises of the night returned. The nightjar’s solemn whistle. A fox scream in the distance. The world painted in shades of gray and lit solely by reflection.”
A mere 15 pages into the novel Powers has nestled beauty and horror together.
The second chapter pivots to George Seldom, an elderly black man losing his house to the 1956 turnpike construction. George takes his displacement as the cue to travel – with a copy of The Negro Traveler’s Green Book – toward a memory of the North Carolina cabin of the woman who raised him from a foundling.
At mid-book, the reader learns how George’s history links to Rawls, Nurse and the Levalloises; George never does. Powers alternates the two narrative threads in a way that complicates all their stories.
When Rawls, still enslaved, is brought home by a group of four white men enraged by him, only Antony Levallois is clear about punishment. The other three “had lived a long time under the assumption that the threat of retribution was enough of a deterrent to keep the course of their lives moving in a predictable direction. And further, their hesitance to use violence to enforce their mastery over those they owned was a sign of a deep well of kindness and loyalty that characterized the tangled knot of the relationships of all involved. Among the five men gathered beneath the colorless buds of the sycamore tree, only two were free of this illusion.”
Those two are Levallois and Rawls, “who had decided long before that a kind master was a terrible master to have.”
Powers bring a psychological acuity to A Shout in the Ruins. These insights and their consequences spill through all his characters, reaching George Seldom a century later, reaching Powers’ readers now.
Another son of Richmond, Tom Wolfe, put The Yellow Birds on par with All Quiet on the Western Front. Wolfe died last month at age 88. Let’s hope that Little, Brown & Co., which published both men’s work, delivered an early manuscript to the elder literary lion in time for him to read it.
Add Isabel Allende‘s groundbreaking first novel, “The House of the Spirits,” to the golden age of television adaptations.
Streaming giant Hulu has acquired the classic 1982 story, which has been translated into more than 35 languages. Allende began it at a low moment in her life when she was 40 years old and living in Venezuela.
This consummate Chilean story follows the Trueba family over four generations and catapulted its author to fame. Deeply personal, “The House of the Spirits” began as Allende’s farewell letter to her 100-year-old grandfather and incorporates elements of magical realism. In the 35 years since its publication, Allende has written more than 20 books, sold more than 70 million copies and become an international touchstone.
Hulu is now seeking a writer and director to helm the project. Allende, who won the Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement prize last year, will serve as executive producer. She lives outside San Francisco.
“My purpose in life seems to be storytelling and nothing else,” she said at the awards ceremony in Cleveland. “Through me, some characters come to life and do what they are meant to do in this world, even if I don’t know what it is.”
The Emmy-award winning “A Handmaid’s Tale,” based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, is one of Hulu’s most watched and critically acclaimed shows. It is also adapting Celeste Ng’s Shaker Heights-based novel, “Little Fires Everywhere.”
“The House of the Spirits” begins with this sentence: “Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.” Now he will be coming to screens everywhere.
Former U.S. poet laureateNatasha Trethewey began her talk at Kent State University by claiming kinship with the audience.
“I always feel slightly at home in Ohio,” she said. “It is the state that allowed my parents to get a marriage license in 1965, allowed me to be born legit in this country, even as our laws still rendered me persona non grata.”
The newborn Trethewey arrived a year later in Gulfport, Mississippi, where her parents’ marriage was illegal under a national patchwork of anti-miscegenation laws. The couple met at Kentucky State College — Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, a black woman fresh from Gulfport, and Eric Trethewey, a white Canadian who hitchhiked his way to campus.
Their brief marriage – they divorced when Natasha was 6 – features heavily in her work, including the poem she chose to open the evening, “Miscegenation.” As she moved through her reading, an expert mix of personal history and political commentary, Tretheway threaded each poem with the pointed focus of race and place.
Such themes frequently lace through her verse, including in her 2012 poetry collection, “Thrall,” in which she uses historical figures to parse identity and belonging. Prior to that, she released “Native Guard,” which heralded the unsung black soldiers who protected the Union during the Civil War. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
Parts of the evening were somber, as Trethewey shared the anger and longing lodged in poems she’d written after the murder of her mother, a social worker, when Natasha Trethewey was a 19-year-old student at the University of Georgia. The awful death, at the hands of a second husband her mother had divorced, pushed Trethewey toward poetry more than anything else. In “Myth” she grapples with painful reoccurring dreams of her mother, often triggering a new wave of grief:
I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
“He had been writing about me my whole life. And he was excited and had a little dread about me becoming a poet because he knew I would set the story straight,” she quipped before a sizeable audience gathered by the Wick Poetry Center.
Now 51 and a professor at Northwestern University, Trethewey took a moment to stitch the social justice movements of the past and present. “Incident,” about an attack at her grandmother’s home when she was a child, brimmed with relevance: “It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns./When they were done, they left quietly. No one came.”
Trethewey looked out at the assembled. “We hear a lot about voter fraud when we really should be talking about voter suppression, voter intimidation, redistricting,” she warned. “But this is not new. We’ve seen this.”
James Brown. John Brown’s raid. Michael Brown. Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka.
These subjects braid through Kevin Young’s new book, Brown, as he creates poems about black culture and boyhood, dividing his collection into “Home Recordings” and “Field Recordings.” It publishes this week.
“It’s a book that’s been brewing for a while,” Young told David Canfield of Entertainment Weekly. “The title poem is one I’ve been trying to write for some time, about growing up in Topeka, Kansas, and going to the church that Rev. Brown of Brown v. Board [pastored]. His daughter Linda played piano and organ in the church, and so to that connection to history always struck me as something worthy of a poem.”
Young dedicates this title poem to his mother and it closes out the section of home recordings. He begins it: The scrolling brown arms/of the church pews curve/like a bone – their backs/bend us upright . . .
In Brown, 31 poems thread from boyhood and back, with a Triptych for Trayvon Martin subdivided into Not Guilty [A Frieze for Sandra Bland]; Limbo [A Fresco for Tamir Rice] and Nightstick [A Mural for Michael Brown].
The book is illustrated with beautiful endpapers of a child’s drawing of a collection of superheroes and nine black-and-white photographs by Melanie Dunea. In January 2015, she traveled to the Mississippi Delta with Young, as he writes, “to capture the spirit of that place with a poetry that enhances my own.”
Their pilgrimage took them to Greenwood, Miss, where the term “black power” was popularized at a Stokely Carmichael rally in 1966, and nearby Money, Miss., where Emmett Till was murdered. These poems call on the reader “to remember but also revisit and revise what we think of the past.” Young mentions in his notes that the white woman who accused Emmett confessed last year that he never whistled or called her baby. He didn’t do a thing.
“The site of Till’s lynching,” Young reports, “feels both holy and haunted.”
The 19 final lines of the book comprise a poem called “Hive.” It also concerns a boy:
The honey bees’ exile
is almost complete.
You can carry
them from hive
to hive, the child thought
& that is what
he tried, walking
with them thronging
between his pressed palms.
Let him be right.
Let the gods look away
as always. Let this boy
who carries the entire
actual, whirring
world in his calm
unwashed hands,
barely walking, bear
us all there
buzzing, unstung.
At 87, Toni Morrison is a direct woman. The Nobel laureate in literature has long contemplated her legacy, and the larger meaning of art, society and belonging.
A moving piece of evidence for this unfurls in The Foreigner’s Home, a feature-length film, making its regional debut at the Cleveland Museum of Art, 35 miles east of Morrison’s childhood town of Lorain, Ohio. The film screens at 2 p.m. Saturday.
The documentary captures the magisterial Morrison mulling the limits of language in 2006 as she curated an exhibit at the Louvre she also called The Foreigner’s Home. Its centerpiece is Theodore Gericault’s massive 1819 oil painting “The Raft of the Medusa,” created just three years after an actual shipwreck off the coast of Senegal that doomed dozens of 19th-century passengers from the lower classes.
“My faith in the world of art is not irrational and it’s not naïve,” Morrison told a Parisian audience. “Art invites us to take a journey from date to information to knowledge to wisdom. Artists make language, images, sounds to bear witness, to shape beauty and to comprehend . . . this conversation is vital to our understanding of what it means to be human.”
The writer explained that the title has two meanings – the foreigner at home, and the foreigner is home, flinging wide the questions of displacement and belonging. She noted that each individual finds oneself “being, fearing or accommodating the stranger.” She put these notions and the Gericault painting before street poets, playwrights, dancers, musicians, choreographers and novelists whom Morrison invited to the Louvre from around the corner, and around the globe.
Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian writer living in New York, lent her insights, and roughly ten years later, traveled to Morrison’s home in the Hudson River valley, to update and enlarge the conversation for the film. (Both women are recipients of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.)
In 2006, architect Ford Morrison traveled to France with his mother and filmed parts of the Paris gathering, then tucked the footage away. Morrison mentioned her desire to have something done with the materials to Jonathan Demme, her neighbor and friend who had directed the cinematic version of her novel “Beloved.”
‘She said, ‘Jonathan, I don’t want to deal with this, but do you know some nice, quiet folk who might want to deal with it?’” recalled Rian Brown-Orso, a co-director of the documentary and professor at Oberlin College.
Demme did. All three of his children attended Oberlin, where he met cinema professors Brown-Orso and Geoff Pingree. Demme helped the duo in their 2009 initiative to restore the Apollo Theatre in Oberlin.
The director agreed to executive produce the Morrison film project. “He thought at the time he’d either use HBO or he’d try us,” Pingree said. Brown-Orso created the hand-painted animation for The Foreigner’s Home and Pingree wrote the script.
But the task was complex and wound up taking five years. “Geoff and I spent two years logging and transcribing,” she said. “Some material was unusable; some had bad sound quality.”
The pair concluded they must ask Morrison to sit for the camera, violating one of her original conditions. Pingree wrote a passionate two-page letter in November 2014, making a case for a new interview. In their letter, the directors asked to build 20 minutes of archival materials into a film commensurate with the ideas Morrison explored. In the intervening years, questions around migration had become more urgent.
Demme and then Oberlin President Marvin Krislov, who had helped raise $350,000 for the project, predicted Morrison would decline. Instead, she agreed.
“We set the film up, and the first thing you hear is water,” Pingree said. “Then we hear [Morrison’s] voice. Then we see an animated boat with hand-drawn figures. They suggest anyone at sea, literally or figuratively offshore. So we begin asking, ‘Where will they land? Who’ll take them in? Where will they find anchor?’”
When The Foreigner’s Home debuted in North America with a screening in Miami in March, Pingree said a viewer approached him. “This 67-year-old white guy came up to say he was riveted. He said, ‘If I could have gotten my 20-year-old self to watch it, it would have changed my entire life.’ “
The man shook Pingree’s hand and melted back into the crowd.
For Brown-Orso, such a response indicates Morrison is sounding a warning, that her voice is prophetic: “Our task was to make a visual space to uphold the power of Ms. Morrison’s words.”
The film is dedicated to Demme, who died last year.
“The mission of art is the destruction of barriers and walls,” Morrison says, “the things that prevent people from connecting with their home or each other.”
With Gateway to the Moon, writer Mary Morris casts a new spell drawing water from some of her favorite wells. Her new novel is publishing today.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner for The Jazz Palace returns to Jewish history, this time spinning a family story across centuries. She puts it in motion in 1492, the year Spain expelled its Muslim and Jewish citizens and Christopher Columbus journeyed to the New World.
In Gateway to the Moon, Morris places on that voyage an interpreter she calls Luis de Torres, a Jew who has disguised himself as a Christian in order to escape the Spanish Inquisition. His descendants travel too, some settling in a little town called Entrada de la Luna in what will eventually be New Mexico. The legacy of Crypto-Judaism, secret adherence to Judaism amid an outward appearance of religious conformity, settles in too.
In her acknowledgments, Morris writes that the new work is “a story I began thinking about more than twenty-five years ago when we lived in Santa Fe and had a babysitter who believed he was a crypto-Jew. I don’t remember his name, but I remember his face and the myriad of questions he asked about Jews and Jewish rituals.” Prodded by her agent, Ellen Levine, Morris dug out her old journals from Santa Fe, which helped germinate the new novel. She dedicates it to Levine, and to her Doubleday editor, Nan A. Talese.
She also dedicates Gateway to the Moon to her husband, Larry O’Connor. Their meeting, charmingly recounted in Morris’ 2015 column for the New York Times Modern Love feature, is as soulful as the cover of her new book.
Morris, a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, quotes the French novelist Andre Malraux in her epigraph: “The great mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.”
Boston-based filmmaker Adam Mazo is quick to admit that he knew little about Native populations growing up in Minnesota.
He’s committed to changing that for future generations with “Dawnland,” the 90-minute documentary premiering this month at the Cleveland International Film Festival. The film centers on the decades of government policy that forced Native children from their families and into adoptive homes, foster care and boarding schools. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards will sponsor three screenings.
The idea for “Dawnland” was sparked from Mazo’s work on another film, “Coexist,” about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. “We were talking about how it felt wrong to not be teaching about genocide in this country’s history,” he said.
The timing aligned with the formation of the Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an innovative attempt between a people and a state government to investigate the harm the state did against indigenous children in Maine.
For the first time, adoptees publicly told their stories of forced assimilation and abuse. “How do you propose that we’re supposed to be healing?” an elder Wabanaki woman asked. “I can’t get over the nightmares . . . where was the state? They were supposed to have been our guardians. But where were they?”
Mazo and co-director Ben Pender-Cudlip produced “First Light,” a 13-minute short film “that gave viewers a preview of the Wabanaki people’s fight to preserve their culture within a system of state-sponsored removal of children. The commission found that from 2000 to 2013, native children in Maine entered foster care 5.1 times the rate of non-Native children.
The duo turned to Kickstarter to fund the full-length project. “We reached our goal a few days before the campaign ended,” said Pender-Cudlip, who has directed more than a dozen short documentary films. “’First Light’ was a huge help. We set up screenings all around New England, events that we used to get conversations started around the film.”
“Dawnland” reveals the untold narrative of Indigenous child removal in the United States through raw, never-before-seen footage. The complete findings of the commission are well worth reading.
“Dawnland” will be the cornerstone of a six-day professional development training on genocide and human rights at the Updstander Academy that Mazo predicts “will be a transformative experience.”
Above all, the directors hope the film will inspire viewers to consider their blind spots.
“A lot of folks, particularly in the Midwest and the east coast, don’t recognize that there are millions of Native people thriving all across this country,” Mazo said. “As a result of this film, we hope that people will acknowledge them and acknowledge whose land they are on.”
The documentary will screen at Tower City Cinemas on three dates: 8:30 p.m. Friday, April 13; 1:20 p.m. Saturday, April 14 with the film forum and 9:20 a.m. Sunday, April 15. Director Adam Mazo and Penobscot Nation Ambassador Maulian Dana, who makes a cameo in the film, will speak at the post-film forum on April 14. You will receive a $2 discount per ticket using the Anisfield-Wolf code: ANW0.
The Cleveland Foundation today unveiled the winners of its 83rd Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. Marlon James, a 2015 Anisfield-Wolf honoree, made the announcement. The 2018 recipients of the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and examines diversity are:
Shane McCrae, In the Language of My Captor, Poetry
N. Scott Momaday, Lifetime Achievement
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Fiction
Kevin Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, Nonfiction
“The new Anisfield-Wolf winners deepen our insights on race and diversity,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., who chairs
the jury. “This year, we honor a lyrical novel haunted by a Mississippi prison farm, a book of exceptional poetry on
what freedom means in captivity, and a breakthrough history of the hoax that speaks to this political moment. All is
capped by the lifetime achievement of N. Scott Momaday, the dean of Native American letters.”
We invite you to join us September 27 as we honor these winners at the State Theatre in Cleveland, in a ceremony emceed by Jury Chair Gates. The ceremony will be part of the third annual Cleveland Book Week, slated for September 24-29. Join our mailing list to be the first to know when the free tickets are available.
Shane McCrae
Shane McCrae interrogates history and perspective with his fifth book, In the Language of My Captor, including
the connections between racism and love. He uses historical persona poems and prose memoir to address the
illusory freedom of both black and white Americans. “These voices worm their way inside your head; deceptively
simple language layers complexity upon complexity until we are shared in the same socialized racial webbing as
the African exhibited at the zoo or the Jim Crow universe that Banjo Yes learned to survive in (‘You can be free//Or
you can live’),” says Anisfield-Wolf Juror Rita Dove. Raised in Texas and California, McCrae taught at Oberlin College for three years before joining the faculty of Columbia University last year. He lives in Manhattan with his
family.
N. Scott Momaday
N. Scott Momaday remade American literature in 1966 with his first novel, House Made of Dawn. It tells the story
of a modern soldier trying to resume his life in Indian Country. The slim book won a Pulitzer Prize, but Momaday
prefers writing poetry, the form his work most often takes. Anisfield-Wolf Jury Chair Gates says Momaday “is at
root a storyteller who both preserves and expands Native American culture in his critically praised, transformative
writing.” He is also a watercolorist, playwright, scholar, professor and essayist. Momaday was born a Kiowa in
Oklahoma and grew up in the Indian southwest. He earned a doctorate at Stanford University, joined its faculty,
and taught American literature widely, including in Moscow. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded
Momaday a National Medal of Arts. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward is the only woman in American letters to receive two National Book Awards, one for her first novel, Salvage the Bones, and another last year for Sing, Unburied, Sing. Both are set in fictional Bois Sauvage, a place
rooted in the rural Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Critics have compared Bois Sauvage to William Faulkner’s fictional
Yoknapatawpha County and Ward’s prose to Toni Morrison’s. Sing, Unburied, Sing serves as a road book, a ghost
story and a tale of sibling love. Anisfield-Wolf juror Joyce Carol Oates called it “a beautifully rendered,
heartbreaking, savage and tender novel.” Ward, who won a MacArthur “genius grant” last fall, lives with her family
in Pas Christian, Miss. She is a professor at Tulane University.
Kevin Young
Kevin Young is a public intellectual, the editor of eight books and the author of 13, including Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. He spent six years researching and writing
this cultural history of the covert American love of the con, and its entanglement with racial history. After 12 years
teaching at Emory University, Young became the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,
and the poetry editor for The New Yorker. Anisfield-Wolf Juror Steven Pinker calls Bunk “rich, informative,
interesting, original and above all timely,” and Juror Joyce Carol Oates says “it should be required reading in all
U.S. schools.”
Matthew Desmond thinks America can’t see itself clearly.
“We’re the richest democracy with the worst poverty. There’s not another advanced society that has the kind of poverty we have,” the sociologist said as he paced the stage at the State Theater in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square.
Dressed casually in a black pullover, Desmond’s talk was the marquee event for One Community Reads, the three-month book club for Greater Cleveland residents to rally around “Evicted,” his Pulitzer prize-winning book on poverty and housing inequality. It is focused on two neighborhoods in Milwaukee and is subtitled “Poverty and Profit in the American City.”
More than 2,000 came out to hear the Princeton University professor. Desmond spent more than a year embedded in Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, charting the challenges of eight families and their landlords.
The statistics for Milwaukee are dire — nearly 1 in 8 renters have experienced at least one eviction. In Cuyahoga County in 2016, some 27,000 families were officially evicted, reported Judge Ronald J.H. O’Leary of Cleveland Municipal Housing Court. That year, one in five renting families in Euclid were forced out of their homes, he said February 23 at the City Club of Cleveland.
Once evictions were rare enough to gather crowds and protests, Desmond writes. But in the last decade, the number has skyrocketed. As an ethnographer, Desmond wanted to know why.
The professor, 38, became a MacArthur Foundation fellow in 2015, the same class of “genius” grant winners that honored playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His soft speaking voice contains a hint of Southern twang, despite his upbringing in Winslow, Arizona, the son of a preacher and his wife.
As a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he began laying the groundwork for “Evicted.” While in Milwaukee, Desmond followed landlords as they collected rent and handed out eviction notices; he accompanied renters everywhere — to church and AA meetings, shelters and funerals.
He also accompanied them to housing court, where he quickly noticed a stark pattern: single black mothers, often returning again and again, stuck in a cycle of poverty and unstable housing. Drawing a parallel to the crisis of mass incarceration, Desmond noted in Cleveland: “Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.”
Eviction pushes families deeper into disadvantage, he argues, adding that eviction is a cause of poverty as much as it is a consequence. The stress of losing a roof over your head — and the logistics of replacing possessions, routines and stability — can hurt job performance and mental health.
“With unstable shelter, everything else falls apart,” Desmond said. “How do we deliver on that obligation?” He wants the federal housing program expanded to include all households below the federal poverty line. Currently, 74 percent of poor families receive no housing assistance, forcing them into grim decisions between paying rent and buying practically anything else. Poor families who achieve stable housing shift their dollars most urgently into food.
Ideally, Desmond said, poor households should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Some now pay as much as 70 to 80 percent, heightening their risk for eviction.
To pay such a federal expansion, Desmond suggests capping the mortgage tax deductions for the wealthy, who account for about 6 percent of homeowners. “That would fundamentally change the face of poverty in America,” he said. “It would drive down family homelessness. It would make eviction rare again.”
Continuing the discussion on poverty and housing inequality, young student artists from Twelve Literary Arts will host a staged reading of “Evicted” at the East Cleveland Public Library on Wednesday, April 4, at 10 a.m. It’s free and open to the public.
McPhee, who has sharpened the reading lives of generations and taught hundreds of journalists at Princeton University, was gracious and brief in accepting the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement at the New School in Manhattan. He paid homage to former New Yorker editor Wallace Shawn, whose careful edit of McPhee’s first piece in 1963 was marked by Shawn’s deliberate words: “It takes as long as it takes.”
“A lifetime of writing. How did that happen?” asked McPhee, 87, as he accepted the prize. National Public Radio host Stacey Vanek Smith praised her mentor’s prose as “writing in the absence of intruding artifice.” She said she had thought at least 1,000 times of certain passages in “Coming into the Country,” McPhee’s classic work about the Alaskan backcountry.
Layli Long Soldier won in poetry for “Whereas,” mesmerizing the audience at the New School in Manhattan with a reading of a poem in which a grown daughter mistakes her father’s cry for a sneeze – having never heard him cry. She is a member of the Oglala Lakota nation and lives in Santa Fe.
Another first-time author, Carina Chocano, won in criticism for her 21 essays called “You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks and Other Mixed Messages.”
The funny, incisive Los Angeles writer said she formed the idea for this book in 2008 when, as a movie critic, she was imbibing a steady diet of pop images of women in film. “Still, I was afraid to write this book, a woman speaking against the official line.”
NBCC board member Walton Muyumba observed, “We seem to tell ourselves movie and TV stories, Chocano suggests, in order to perpetuate old lies about gender, generally, and women, specifically. In fact, we seem to find deep pleasure in their continuous repetition. . . Chocano doesn’t send the readers down the rabbit hole (we’re living in Wonderland already) so much as she uses these pieces like smelling salts to awaken us to our collective gas-lighting.”
Biography honored another kind of cultural exemplar: Laura Ingalls Wilder, captured in the marvelous book “Prairie Fires” by Caroline Fraser. Wilder transformed her family’s struggle with poverty, disappointment and loss into fiction that has never gone out of print, has been translated into 45 languages, and sold more than 60 million books, Fraser said. The “Little House” titles cemented American pioneer mythology with a darkly libertarian streak.
“Laura Ingalls Wilder endures,” notes NBCC board member Elizabeth Taylor, ”and now future generations can read Fraser’s marvelous biography and understand her vision of how Ingalls dreams of the frontier. Caroline Fraser has brilliantly recast our understanding of Laura Ingalls Wilders’ life and times, and affirmed her influence in shaping the myth of the iconic West.”
A dissemination of a different set of ideas is characterized in Frances FitzGerald’s “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.” It won in nonfiction. FitzGerald quoted Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s admonition as a potent form of prosperity theology: “If you pray for a camper, tell Him what color; you don’t make God do your shopping.”
Taylor writes, “In convincing detail, FitzGerald charts the evolution of evangelism from a religious to a political movement.” The author thanked Jerry Falwell and his church in Lynchburg, Va., for their welcome and patience with her journalism.
In autobiography, the London-based filmmaker Xiaolu Gau won for “Nine Continents: A Memoir In and Out of China.” Critic Marion Winik describes it as “a thrilling, fist-pumping kind of story” about the author’s escape from cruelty and poverty in Communist China, salted with “a funny and entertaining disquisition” on why it is so hard for Chinese people to learn the English language.
Joan Silber won the fiction prize for “Improvement,” her seventh novel. It follows a single mother in New York, her four-year-old son, her free-spirited aunt and a boyfriend with plans to smuggle cigarettes across state lines. “There is not a wasted word in the novel’s 227 pages, which nevertheless contain multitudes,” writes NBCC board member Tom Beer.
“I’m always happy when someone describes my fiction as generous,” Silber said as she accepted the prize. “If nothing else, fiction reminds us that others have interior lives.”
For the first time in NBCC history, the winners across all six book categories were women.
Can the United States transition “from being an occupier to being a neighbor”?
The documentary follows four key participants in a truth and reconciliation commission entered into five years ago by the Wabanaki people and the state of Maine. It centers on the consequences of decades of government policy that ripped Native children from their families and placed them in foster homes.
The commission, which ran for 27 months, reported that between 2002 and 2013, Native children in Maine were five times more likely to be forced from their homes than non-Native children.
“Our film,” says Bruce Duthu, a Dartmouth professor of Native studies, “reveals a practice of state power that is ongoing, state action directed at the heart of the family and depriving individuals of something that I think most of us take for granted: the idea not only that we can have children but raise them the way that we want to.”
Duthu looks into the camera to say, “When state power deprives people of that right, we should all be concerned.”
The documentary will screen at Tower City Cinemas on three dates: 8:30 p.m. Friday, April 13; 1:20 p.m. Saturday, April 14 with a film forum and 9:20 a.m. Sunday, April 15. You will receive a $2 discount per ticket using the Anisfield-Wolf code: ANW0. Tickets go on sale March 23.
“It is hard to fathom for many in Maine that genocide occurred here,” the commission report states, “much less that it continues to occur in a cultural form.”
Jill Lepore is restless.
The Harvard historian prefers to walk while she thinks, and stand when she talks. And so she stood before perhaps 800 guests gathered in Cleveland to hear her ponder whether a divided nation can own a shared past.
“A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, will fight forever over the meaning of its history,” she writes in These Truths: A History of the United States, a 1,000-page civics lesson that W.W. Norton will publish in September.
Sweeping American histories were once common, particularly in the 1930s, Lepore said. They mustered an argument for American democracy, a rebuttal in the teeth of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and their ilk. Now the nation is divided down the middle, she observed, with the hero of one half – Barack Obama or Donald Trump – serving as the villain of the other.
Asked about economic inequality, Lepore acknowledged its rise since 1968. But it is race, not class, in her estimation, that undergirds our systems: “Race is the foundation of our politics in a way that is mainly horrifying,” she said. “I put race squarely at the center of the history of the United States – it really is the driver of our political change.”
With her third history, New York Burning, Lepore won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2006. It explores 18th-century, pre-Revolutionary War Manhattan, specifically the winter of 1741, when ten fires beset the seaport village. With each blaze, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. In the end, 13 black men were burned at the stake, 17 hanged, and more than 100 black women and men were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall.
In her Cleveland presentation, Lepore, 51, started earlier still, noting that the very decision of where to begin a history is political. She flashed up an image on the multiple screens of the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Called the T-O Map (left), it dates to Medieval Spain and is considered the first conceptual map Westerners made of the world.
Next came the 1507 Waldseemuller map, made by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller. Its enormous popularity helped cement the name “America” for the new lands. “Like much of history, the naming was a crapshoot,” Lepore said.
She flashed up a painted portrait with a globe meant to cement Queen Elizabeth’s dominance over the new world (1588) as well as Powhatan’s Mantle (1607), meant to illustrate something similar about the regency of a Chesapeake chief.
The physical Constitution itself, widely printed and distributed in 1787, is a kind of map that argues “the people are sovereign by virtue of reading, a wholly new idea that sticks,” Lepore said. “The debate over the Constitution was really a strong one with Alexander Hamilton asking if people can rule themselves by coming up with a set of laws that govern by reason and choice instead of accident and force.”
One of the scholar’s favorite images portrays Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and feminist, knitting the nation – made in 1864, a year after the Emancipation Proclamation. The outline of the United States lies in yarn on her lap.
Eight years earlier came a depiction that embraces the “technological sublime,” the idea that a technological fix could bind up the nation. In 1856 that was the transcontinental railroad. In 2000, it was an issue of Wired Magazine arguing that the internet would heal the nation’s political divisions in ten years.
As for the present, “historians make terrible prophets,” Lepore declared.
She noted that guns and abortion were apolitical topics a half-century ago. Now they serve as mirrored partisan gold-standards: Conservatives see guns as freedom and abortion as murder and liberals see guns as murder and abortion as freedom.
Lepore preferred, in writing the nation’s history, to dwell on a conversation between Henry Longfellow and his close friend Charles Sumner, during the perilous year 1848. The poet shared his new work, “The Building of the Ship of State,” in which the country is wrecked and sinks. Sumner implored Longfellow to give it a more optimistic cast. And when the poet did, it contained the famous lines: “Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!/Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”
Abraham Lincoln read these lines and wept. Sumner’s argument for optimism spoke deeply to Lepore. She deplores the fashionable radical pessimism – right or left – that characterizes our day, calling it “a kind of political cowardice.”
She cited a survey indicating that in the last year, only one in four Americans has had a political conversation with someone with whom they disagree – a perilous fact in itself.
Ever the historian, she suggested that citizens “wrestle with the facts, presume good will, use debate, examine the materials and make some arguments about the evidence.”
Leila Chatti, a poet who grew up in Michigan, will be the first Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Editing, beginning her appointment this fall at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. She has dual citizenship in Tunisia and the United States.
She was chosen from among almost 90 applicants.
“I am drawn to this fellowship in particular because I almost did not become a writer,” Chatti explained in her application. “As a child, I loved books, but because I had never encountered any written by or about people like me, I didn’t believe I would be able to write them; I thought writing was an occupation for other kinds of people, and that, by extension, my experience — my story — was not worth telling.
“It wasn’t until high school that I saw myself reflected on the page. An English teacher one day brought me a stack of books by Naomi Shihab Nye, and it was as if the world shifted. For the first time, I felt I, too, could do it — because I had seen it existed, I now knew it was possible.”
Chatti is currently living in Madison, Wis., where she is the Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at the state university. Her poems are collected into two forthcoming chapbooks, Ebb and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. Readers can find her work now in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, and The Rumpus.
The fellowship will have a community engagement piece that Chatti will design in Cleveland as she works on her first book.
“Once I was discouraged from writing early in my career for being too female and too Muslim, by those who were neither,” Chatti told the selection committee, “an instance of the systemic silencing in writing establishments and publishing that I hope to combat.”
Caryl Pagel, director of the CSU Poetry Center, called Chatti “a very gifted writer” and expressed her enthusiasm for the new position. “We hope to help address the longstanding lack of diversity in U.S. publishing, expand our literary service to the Cleveland community, and help raise our city’s profile as a center for innovative poetry and prose,” Pagel said.
Her sentiment was echoed by Karen R. Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards: “The U.S. publishing industry is structured so that its members are 89 percent white, according to a 2014 industry-wide survey,” Long said. “We are delighted to address this inequity with something new under the sun: an editing and writing fellowship housed in the resurgent Cleveland State University Poetry Center. We see this as a new on-ramp that will benefit the literary arts, Cleveland and Leila Chatti herself.”
The fellowship runs two years and will bring the poet closer to her hometown. “I have a deep love for the Midwest, and a sense of responsibility to give back in any way I can,” Chatti said between sessions at the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. “I am so thrilled to return to my part of the country, the part that raised me.”
Here is her poem, “Fasting In Tunis”:
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
– ROBERT HASS
My God taught me hunger
is a gift, it sweetens
the meal. All day, I have gone without
because I know at the end I will
eat and be satisfied. In this way,
my desire is bearable.
I endure this day
as I have endured years of days
without the whole of your affection.
Your desire is one capable of rest.
Mine keeps its eyes open, stalks
through heat that quivers,
waits to be fed.
The sun burns a hole through
the sky and I am patient.
The ocean eats and eats
at the sand and still hungers.
I watch its wide blue tongue, knowing
you are on the other side.
What is greater: the distance between
these bodies, or their need?
Noon gapes, a vacant maw—
there is long to go
until the moon is served, white as a plate.
You are far and still sleeping;
the morning has not yet slunk into your bed,
its dreams so vast and solitary.
Once, long ago,
I touched you,
and I will touch you again—
your mouth a song
I remember, your mouth
a sugar I drink.
As the #MeToo movement surges on, elevating the national conversation around sexual assault and gender inequality, Professor Heather Shotton believes one crucial population is missing from the discussion.
“Thirty-four percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women will be raped in their lifetime,” Shotton told her audience at the University of Akron, “the highest per capita rate in the nation. The fact that Native voices are absent from [Me Too] is part of the problem.”
Shotton’s delivery at the university’s Rethinking Race symposium was slow and measured, covering more than 400 years of Native American history in “Slurred Realities: Pocahontas, Misrepresentations, and Political Punchlines.” As part of the two-week forum, now in its eleventh year, Shotton was one of several keynotes centered on unraveling difficult conversations about race.
From debunking the myths fortified by the 1995 Disney classic to the arrival of Native costumes every Halloween, her talk was a visual feast of how unchecked stereotypes can color perception of an entire group.
Google “Native American women,” Shotton notes, and you’ll be bombarded with two types of images: one of the sexualized Native women, with come-hither eyes and a sexy pout, or historical portraits of women in traditional attire. “When we reduce indigenous women to nothing more than a costume or a cartoon . . . it skews our understanding of the real history. What would it look like if we shifted how we saw Indigenous women?”
As a citizen of the Wichita & Affiliated Tribes, Shotton, 41, spent the first half of her childhood in Davis, Oklahoma, a small town where she and her family enjoyed a tight-knit Native community. But when her family moved to Texas just prior to Heather’s junior high years, only three other Native students were enrolled. “There was often a black/white binary in my community,” she said. “So, you were either/or, and I wasn’t really either.”
After her formal remarks, one student questioned how to become more informed about the issues facing Native populations. “I feel like the education many of us received was watered down,” she told Shotton.
Shotton chuckled before answering. “You’re right. It is watered down. Most of our histories were written by non-native people, so it’s a western, colonized perspective.” She urged them to read literature by indigenous authors and scholars like Adrienne Keene or Sarah Deer for an alternate viewpoint.
“Understand your place as an ally,” she cautioned the students. “Sometimes that means working behind and not taking up center stage.”
In January – after a student-led outcry – copies were back in the high schools of Katy, Texas, albeit paired with a parental consent form. The consternation began when a middle-school parent complained about profanity and drug use at a party depicted in the book’s opening scene.
Angie Thomas, who wrote that scene, had a few observations about her breakout book, which spent 38 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list. It was arguably the young adult sensation of 2017.
‘There are 89 f-words in ‘The Hate U Give;’ I know because I counted them,” Thomas told an overflow crowd at the Cleveland Public Library. “And last year, more than 900 people were killed by police. People should care more about that number than the number of f-words.”
The novel, characterized by YA king John Green as a “classic for our times,” centers on Starr Carter, a 16-year-old growing up in a gritty neighborhood and navigating a preppy private high school.
“I went to a mostly white, upper-class Christian school in conservative Mississippi,” Thomas said of Belhaven University. “They love Jesus but they don’t want people to have rights. I had to be two Angies.”
Thomas, now 30, was warm and frank and proud, declaring her love for the Cleveland Cavaliers and describing a complex Mississippi heritage: saying y’all and having a mother who heard the shots that killed civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Yet Thomas said she grew up without anyone calling her the n-word.
In the second chapter of “The Hate U Give,” Starr is riding in a Chevy Impala alongside her childhood friend Khalil when he is pulled over and shot to death by a police officer.
The novel germinated in Thomas’ anger over the 2009 police killing of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old shot in the back on a Bay Area Rapid Transit platform. It began as a short story, her senior project as a creative writing major at Belhaven.
By the time Thomas finished writing “The Hate U Give” three years ago, it had ignited a bidding war among 13 publishing houses. And Amandla Stenberg had been cast as Starr in the Fox 2000 film, a decision that inflamed some readers who pictured a darker-skinned girl as they read the book. Thomas responded on Twitter that she was not involved in casting, but that she “supports Stenberg 1000%.”
“So much of her story is Starr’s story,” Thomas said. “But that’s Amandla’s story to tell. I know colorism is an issue, but I watched her on the set in Atlanta and she understood so much. She made me cry. I hope people will give Amandla a chance.”
In an aside, Thomas praised “Black Panther,” which dominated the weekend box office. “If you haven’t seen it yet, what are you doing with your life?” she enthused. “It’s going to change the film industry. It’s already changed mine (movie). I can’t say how, but it is.”
As she does in most of her ports-of-call, Thomas explained the title. The first letter of each word spells thug, a reference to the tattoo across Tupac Shakur’s abdomen. He explained it as “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fxxxs Everyone” or T.H.U.G L.I.F.E.
Teenaged Angie idolized the music of Tupac, and saw hip-hop as art-as-activism. She had a short-lived stint as a teen rapper, calling herself Young Short-A. And she encouraged her audience – packed with youth from throughout Cleveland – to see themselves as roses in concrete, a reference to Tupac sampling Nikki Giovanni.
About 500 Clevelanders turned out to hear and cheer Thomas, whose next novel, “On the Come Up,” is due out in June. She returned the crowd’s affection: “You drive trends. You change language. Hip-hop was started by teenagers, 15-, 16-year-olds in the Bronx in a basement with a turntable and a mic.”
Without embellishment, she declared her intent: “I am here to beg you to change the world.”
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In her Cleveland presentation, Lepore, 51, started earlier still, noting that the very decision of where to begin a history is political. She flashed up an image on the multiple screens of the Maltz Performing Arts Center. Called the T-O Map (left), it dates to Medieval Spain and is considered the first conceptual map Westerners made of the world.
One of the scholar’s favorite images portrays Sojourner Truth, abolitionist and feminist, knitting the nation – made in 1864, a year after the Emancipation Proclamation. The outline of the United States lies in yarn on her lap.