Anisfield-Wolf poet Elizabeth Alexander will be the next president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, becoming the first woman to head the nation’s largest foundation for the humanities.
“All of the things that I’ve cared about my whole life and worked toward my whole life Mellon does,” Alexander told The New York Times.
The author of six books and two collections of essays won the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement prize in 2010. A year earlier she recited an original poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Her latest book, “The Light of the World,” chronicled the sudden loss of her husband, painter and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus, and became a top book of 2015 for the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, and other outlets.
Alexander, 55, who lives in Harlem with her two sons, spent 15 years rebuilding the African-American studies department at Yale University before joining the Ford Foundation, where she directed grants in journalism, arts and culture. She helped design Agnes Gund’s $100 Million Art for Justice Fund.
Her first job is listening, Alexander told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “There’s still a lot I need to learn to figure out together with the staff, and what it is we want to do, so I am not laying out a foreign program,” she said.
Alexander riveted her audience in Cleveland’s Severance Hall in 2010 when she read “Stokley and Adam,” a signature poem about Adam Clayton Powell and Stokely Carmichael from her book “Crave Radiance.”
She told the Chronicle that she hopes to use her new position to help the public “understand that philanthropy is not just about, you know, sending checks, but it’s also about amplifying ideas.”
She will join the Mellon Foundation, headquartered in New York City, in March.
“You would never hear me use the word ‘diversity’ except to criticize it,” she declared to a large Cleveland audience at Case Western Reserve University’s Martin Luther King Jr. convocation. “Diversity is a word that makes white liberals feel good.”
The 41-year-old MacArthur “genius” recipient and New York Times journalist is “a fundamental voice reshaping the national education agenda,” as CWRU President Barbara Snyder puts it. Hannah-Jones specializes in investigative reporting on school re-segregation and its consequences.
“Nothing says more about us than our choice about where we send our children to school,” she said. “I’m not talking about Trump voters. I’m talking about progressives who don’t live their professed values.”
Perhaps her most-discussed reporting last year published as a New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story entitled “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” In it, the author explores how she and her husband decided to enroll their child in their Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood elementary school, where most of the children are poor, black and Latino.
“I decided we would not use our privilege to escape the children in our neighborhood,” Hannah-Jones told her audience, which included students from five Cleveland-area schools, three of which fit the same demographic profile. “As an upper-middle class, highly-educated person, I can make up for whatever that school isn’t giving her.”
Some of the response to the story was withering. Reader upon reader asked, “How dare you sacrifice your child?” The author’s retort: “Whose children should we sacrifice?”
She spent the bulk of her Cleveland presentation making vivid what becomes of children mired in re-segregated U.S. schools. Those citizens grow up to experience more poverty, more illness, more segregation and shorter lives. And Hannah-Jones came packing information specific to her audience: the history of busing in Cleveland and the rapid re-segregation once the court order came off. Ohio public schools rank fourth in extreme racial segregation– only New York, New Jersey and California are worse.
This matters, Hannah-Jones said, because the only instrument proven to shrink the racial achievement gap is integration. In the 17 short years during which the country moved toward integration, which peaked in 1988, the racial achievement gap was slashed by more than half. As a schoolgirl in Waterloo, Iowa, young Nikole herself was bussed, more than two hours each day.
She stressed that white children didn’t make her, or any other students, better but the resources that accrue to whites do: more experienced teachers, more classroom resources, more advanced-placement curriculum and more rigorous instruction. Hannah-Jones calls this “the milk and honey” that too rarely touches the black and brown children, now composing half of the American public school enrollment.
“And then we blame those children for not achieving what white children do who receive all the milk and honey,” she observed.
“If we truly care about our children, why wouldn’t we do the one thing we know helps every child? This is the denial of full citizenship and equality in the place we expect the most equality: school.”
The writer has little truck with magnet and charter solutions. “One thing about the choice movement is it market-izes what should be public. If you play the Hunger Games with public schools, those on the bottom will continue to die.”
Hannah-Jones won a Peabody award for an absorbing 2015 piece called The Problem We All Live With, which will also be the title of her forthcoming book.
That radio journalism is a portrait of the Normandy Public Schools, the worst performing district in Missouri. Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, led Hannah-Jones to this topic, because McSpadden – in the hour of her grief – spoke out about her teenage son managing to graduate just months before Ferguson Policeman Darren Wilson shot him dead. This caught Hannah-Jones’ attention. McSpadden declined to be interviewed, but other African-American mothers stepped forward to delineate their struggles against the abysmal Normandy schools ensnaring their children.
Hannah-Jones described her pessimism that African-American children will achieve full equality, even as she spoke of her own family’s generational gain, naming the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son” as her favorite. A student bluntly asked why — given her assertion that the future is bleak — she had brought her own daughter into the world.
The journalist laughed, allowing that her pregnancy was unplanned, but then turned serious. “One of the biggest acts of resistance is to say, ‘I will exist.’ Our existence is our resistance.”
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, is no stranger to resistance. Her searing new memoir, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” makes that plain.
Khan-Cullors, along with organizers Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, created the call to action after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager Zimmerman killed as the adolescent walked alone back to his father’s home from a trip to a convenience store.
The author was the one to punctuate their grief with a three-word hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter.
Her story begins in Van Nuys, the largely Mexican Los Angeles neighborhood notorious for an overbearing police presence. Born third of four children, she writes of growing up as her mother worked 12-hour days and law enforcement constantly harassed her two older brothers.
When her brother Monte, just two years older, became a teen, he began exhibiting signs of schizoaffective disorder, which led to multiple stints of incarceration. During it all, his mental illness went mostly untreated. Reading about Monte’s struggle is heartbreaking and frames Khan-Cullors’ social justice work.
The author, now 33, became a community organizer in her teens. She benefited from a magnet high school that focused on social justice, and training through the Strategy Center – which helped partly demilitarize the Los Angeles police department in 2016.
At 272 pages, “When They Call You a Terrorist” is less a story about the Black Lives Matter movement than the day-to-day realities of living in a country where that declaration even has to be made. The co-founders and members of Black Lives Matter committed to 11 guiding principles, the first being that the United States must “end all violence against black bodies.”
“We are firm in our conviction that our lives matter by virtue of our birth, and by virtue of the service we have offered to people, systems and structures that did not love, respect or honor us,” Khan-Cullors writes. The three co-founders of the movement wanted their work to “spread like wildfire.”
The movement, of course, has its critics. The “They” in the title refers to some entities, most notably the FBI, which listed “black identity extremists” in 2017 as a terror threat. Perhaps surprisingly, Khan-Cullors spends just a paragraph on her direct rebuttal: “Terrorism is being stalked and surveilled simply because you are alive. And terrorism is being put in solitary confinement and starved and beaten. And terrorism is not being able to feed your children despite working three jobs. And terrorism is not having a decent school or a place to play.”
Once the movement took off, Khan-Cullors was miffed by the greater visibility men enjoyed that the founders did not. “Opal, Alicia and I never wanted or needed to be the center of anything,” she writes. “We were purposeful about decentralizing our role in the work. But neither did we want or deserve to be erased.”
In this way, she observes, history repeats itself: “…like the women who organized, strategized, marched, cooked, typed up and did the work to ensure the Civil Rights Movement, women whose names go unknown and unnamed.”
It is therefore disappointing that Khan-Cullors includes very little about her relationship with her co-founders, Alicia Garza or Opal Tometi, both before and during their public ascent. Perhaps she prefers that they speak for themselves, but her book would be stronger had readers been given a glimpse.
Still, “When They Call You a Terrorist,” co-authored with Asha Bandele, is stirring. The collaboration between the two feels organic, and the writing flows with an easy rhythm.
“I didn’t think I had a story inside of me,” Khan-Cullors told The Root. “Because oftentimes for black women, the role that has been relegated to us is to be the container for someone else’s story. We’re the partner, the extra in someone else’s tale.”
Jesmyn Ward, whose fiction is drawing comparisons to William Faulkner’s, received a new honor this week: her 2017 novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” will kick off a new book discussion led by the New York Times and the PBS NewsHour. Called Now Read This, the organizers hope to become a go-to resource for reading groups across the country.
Ward, the only woman to win a National Book Award twice for fiction, continues to live in rural Mississippi, the source of her family life and much of her inspiration. Born in 1977, Ward attended Stanford University and had decided in 2008 to turn away from the writing life and, at her mother’s urging, enroll in nursing school when Agate Publishing picked up her first novel, “Where the Line Bleeds.” It tells of two brothers on divergent paths and is set on the Gulf Coast. Ward followed this work with “Salvage the Bones,” arguably the best fiction to arise out of Hurricane Katrina. In 2014, Ward came to speak at the Cleveland Public Library, where she described her reading and writing and her strong identification with communities on the margins.
Last year, Ward received a no-strings $625,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. “I don’t shy away from tough topics,” she says on the foundation’s video, praising the Gulf, the bayous and the regional habits of storytelling.
In a nationally unique innovation, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards has partnered with the Cleveland State University Poetry Center to create a fellowship aimed at the lack of diversity in publishing. The Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing & Publishing is a two-year post-graduate position for an emerging writer. It will encompass time to work toward a first or second book and an opportunity to learn editing, publishing, literary programming, and community outreach.
Through the creation of this fellowship, Anisfield-Wolf and the CSU Poetry Center hope to support writers from historically underrepresented communities. The Cleveland Foundation awarded $71,000 over two years to support the salary and benefits of the fellow at the poetry center’s literary press.
“The publishing industry is 89 percent staffed by whites,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. “Here is an opportunity to dent that bulwark, one fellowship at a time. We are honored to partner with Cleveland State and its distinguished poetry center to create a new on-ramp into this vital arena, and to improve Cleveland’s literary scene in the process.”
Poet Adrian Matejka, who won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 2014, will serve on the fellowship advisory board. So will poets Hayan Charara and Prageeta Sharma; publicist and poet Kima Jones and author Janice Lee.
The Poetry Center is an independent nonprofit press that publishes three to five books of contemporary poetry, prose, and translation each year. It hosts the Lighthouse Reading Series and serves as a teaching lab for undergraduate and graduate students at Cleveland State University and within the Northeast Ohio MFA program. The fellow will have the opportunity to review submissions, attend editorial meetings, and assist with Center contests.
In addition, this individual will be able to create her or his own outreach program, with the possibility of developing an anthology; organize community writing workshops; develop reading series to engage previously underserved communities; or work with a local organization involved in education, social justice, and the literary arts.
Coming off a successful year of literary prizes, three of the 2017 recipients of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards will reconvene for a closing panel session at the Virginia Festival of the Book.
Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes and recipient of the 2017 Chautauqua Prize;
Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio and recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and
Margot Lee Shetterly, author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race and winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction.
They will be joined by jury member Rita Dove, who will share their writing and insights about race and culture, with particular focus on the August 2017 events that took place in Charlottesville:
This conversation, titled “Writing the American Story: Diverse Voices in Distinguished Books,” will take place at a public program on Sunday, March 25, 2018, at 3:00 PM at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The program will feature a discussion of their work, reflections on obstacles to racial justice, and writing that helps make the American story a complete story.
“The Virginia Festival of the Book’s reputation in the literary community is par excellence, and we are honored to
join the 2018 program,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which are presented by
the Cleveland Foundation. “The Nazi violence in Charlottesville last August shocked the nation, and the Anisfield-
Wolf canon – exemplary books addressing racism and diversity — is pertinent to the work ahead for all of us. This
makes the Anisfield-Wolf panel a natural fit for the Festival, one we welcome.”
“Writing the American Story” is the official closing program of the Festival, and seeks to support and celebrate diversity while working towards understanding the invasive and structural roots of racism. This program will be free and open to the public. Following the discussion, speakers will welcome audience questions.
Marilyn Chin is a frank and feminist poet who continues to enlarge the Anisfield-Wolf canon.
Like Peter Ho Davies, she is a master of the hyphenated identity, writing, “ I am a Chinese American poet – born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. My poetry both laments and celebrates the ‘hyphenated’ identity.”
Chin, a professor of English and comparative literature at San Diego State University, has a new poem reaching the 350,000 subscribers to the American Academy of Poet’s digitally delivered Poem-A-Day. Her new work is called “Love Story,” a perennial focus of Chin’s work. Her Anisfield-Wolf winning collection is called “Hard Love Province.”
Of her new poem, the 62-year-old Chin says, “The immigrant couple’s entire life history is told in just five triplet stanzas . . . This might be a typical American story: an immigrant couple gets married, the husband gets a good job (an iron rice bowl), they conceive children, grow old, die peacefully in their new nation. However, their story does not quite end in harmonious resolution. A love story is a never-ending drama.”
Love Story
by Marilyn Chin
The aerogram says come the photos show bliss
Another felicitous union a fresh beginning
He’s so handsome fat she’s so new world slim
The envelopes are red the writing vermeil
He’ll get a good job an iron rice bowl won’t break
She’s caught a princely man a silent one like her father
Sister dyes pink eggs Auntie boils cider knuckles
The Great Patriarch is happy a bouncy grandson
A bundle of joy from a test tube in heaven
Thank you for your blessings for your lucky lycee
A young nurse cares for her now in a small hospice near the sea
He’s alone on Silicon Hill that’s where he’s happy
Emails turn silent Instagrams remiss
Thank you for the white gardenias they’ll sweeten her soul
The joss paper boats will net fish for her in the next world
At the tail end of Cleveland Book Week, Adam Sockel and Jill Grunenwald, hosts of the “Professional Book Nerds” podcast, interviewed Karan Mahajan, our 2017 co-winner for fiction. Their conversation centered on Mahajan’s award-winning “The Association of Small Bombs,” the difficulties of writing about terrorism, and the proliferation of books on the subject after 9/11.
The podcast is a production of OverDrive, the leading app for eBooks and audiobooks available through public libraries and schools, headquartered in Cleveland. In the weekly podcast, hosts Sockel and Grunenwald chat about the best books they’ve read, give personalized recommendations, and share about upcoming releases across genres.
Dive into their 30-minute conversation with Mahajan here below.
One idea to make the morning commute more bearable for Clevelanders? Add a bit of poetry.
That theory was tested this past September as local poets from Twelve Literary and Performative Arts set up shop on RTA platforms across the city to perform samples from Anisfield Wolf authors for the duration of Cleveland Book Week.
Riders heard snippets from Jericho Brown‘s “The New Testament” and Marilyn Chin‘s “Hard Love Province,” along with five other authors and original works from the local poets. These informal poetry readings were an expansion of the Inter|Urban public art project, a 19-mile stretch of vibrant literary-inspired murals and photo installations along the RTA’s Red Line. Recently, the project expanded into University Circle with a mural inspired by Tyehimba Jess’ “Olio.”
“There’s such a difference between reading a text and hearing it performed—we wanted to capture the emotion within the literature in a way that made it accessible and real,” said Tiffany Graham, project director for LAND Studio.
Take a peek at this four-minute video, produced by LAND Studio, that is guaranteed to put you on the ground, in the poetry, and in the mood for more:
It makes sense that his 14-line poem, “Blind Tom Plays for Confederate Troops, 1863” inspired the new Anisfield-Wolf InterIUrban mural from the artist Mike Perry.
The new work braids along the right angle of two walls at Ford Drive and Hessler Road in Cleveland, Perry’s first project in this city. He created the 2015 wraparound mural at the Facebook offices in New York City and is probably best known for his colorful animation on “Broad City,” the Comedy Central series.
While navigating a week of Midwestern October weather, Perry dropped in on the Cleveland School of the Arts, where he spoke to a morning class on street art. Wearing a bright blue sweatshirt with his motto “Don’t Give Up,” Perry brought a relaxed, coffee-sipping presence. He is partial to creating flowers with a surrealistic bent.
“I kind of call B.S. on this notion that you have to choose to be an artist,” the 36-year-old said. “Some people can’t help but be weirdo creatives.” He encouraged students to sketch while he chatted about his own path from Kansas to Minnesota to the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., the same borough that, incidentally, is home to Tyehimba Jess.
Kelly likened his complicated art to meditation: “I can’t not do this.”
Jon Sedor, a second-year teacher at the School of the Arts, observed that “street art is a way to reach a lot of people without being too in-your-face.”
Kelly, his jeans splotched with paint, delivered this advice: “Make the work, put it out there, let people see it. Murals are a public forum for people to accidentally discover what you do – like the internet.”
The artist/animator read a brief from LAND Studio about Jess and soaked in several poems. “I felt inspired and tried a couple of drawings,” he said. “I don’t know what this mural is about yet; I haven’t finished it.”
Now it commands one of the most heavily-trafficked pedestrian corners of Cleveland. One source, “Blind Tom,” was the nickname for Thomas Wiggins. He was a musical prodigy, a slave, and one of the best known touring pianists of the 19th century. Kelly’s mural features a snaking keyboard.
Here is “Blind Tom Plays for The Confederate Troops, 1863”:
The slave’s hands dance free, unfettered, flying
across ivory, feet stomping toward
a crescendo that fills the forest pine,
reminding the Rebs what they’re fighting for –
black, captive labor. Tom, slick with sweat, shows
a new trick: Back turned to his piano,
he leans like a runner about to throw
himself to freedom through forest bramble –
until he spreads his hands behind him. He
hitches fingertips to keys, hauls Dixie
slowly out of the battered upright’s teeth
like a worksong dragged across cotton fields,
like a plow, weighted and dirty, ringing
with a slaver’s song at master’s bidding.
Four years after Andrew Solomon took home the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction prize for “Far from the Tree,” his work is finding a new medium: film.
Next month, the documentary version from Emmy award-winning filmmaker Rachel Dretzin will premiere at DOC NYC, the nation’s largest documentary-focused film festival. The response has been strong enough to add a second showing.
The 90-minute film, also called “Far From the Tree,” uses the same scaffolding as the book, embedding viewers in the lives of parents whose children fit into disparate identities: deafness, autism, and dwarfism, along with seven others.
“All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves,” writes Solomon in his text. Dretzin pulls on that thread in the documentary, weaving together interviews and on-the-ground footage. Snippets of the production show the film crew attending the annual Little People of America conference and accompanying one of the featured couples to an ultrasound appointment.
Solomon, who also served as a producer on the film, will attend the premiere, along with Dretzin and producer Jamila Ephron. In 2013, as Solomon, a gay man, accepted his Anisfield-Wolf distinction in Cleveland, he said, “This award is particularly meaningful to me because it is an award that is predicated on the question of identity . . . I feel that it was identity politics that rescued me from an element of despair that was present in my earlier life.”
The Cleveland Kids’ Book Bank is a juggernaut.
Less than 20 months after its founding in March 2016, it had distributed 848,583 free books to underserved children in Cuyahoga County.
And as hard as it is to visualize that number – even standing in a warehouse staffed by 3,000 volunteers – the number of titles is shifting upward, faster than the weekly update on its website can track.
“Early exposure to reading is critical to brain development, literacy skills, school readiness and adult success,” said John R. Corlett, president of the Center. “Unfortunately, for many children, having a book is a luxury.”
Fitting snugly in the Anisfield-Wolf tradition, the Cleveland Kids’ Book Bank exists to foster literacy and a love of reading. But it exists only because two women — Judi Kovach and Judy Payne — put themselves in a position to have a moment of creative brilliance, then act upon it.
Book Bank Board Member Deena Epstein puts it this way: “If you want to find a book that represents the two Judys, I might suggest ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ If all the characters were rolled into two figures, you’d have Judi and Judy possessing heart, courage, brains and humility. Their road is paved not with yellow bricks, but with books, and it leads not to Oz but to Cleveland where all its children share a love of reading.”
Payne and Kovach met through the Little Free Library movement, which places birdhouse-like structures along city streets so that passersby can donate a book or take one home. In Cleveland, the women saw demand outstripping supply.
They learned of a Toledo, Ohio distributor that had been pulping hundreds of thousands of books, and – unlike anyone else in grassroots literacy – dared to imagine all those titles being diverted to Cleveland.
Where there once was a dead-end in a landfill, there is now a brimming warehouse where volunteers sort and box books to more than 600 partners – schools and nonprofit agencies, which put the books in the hands of children and their households.
But what does it mean to distribute more than 60,000 high-quality, gently-used books to Cleveland children each month?
The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a national report in 2014 calling on each parent to read aloud to their child – daily – from infancy. This is critical to a brain that triples in size in the first three years. It is essential to the neurological scaffolding that will allow a child to thrive.
You’ve heard of the 30 million word gap? That is chasm a child faces by age four who grows up in a language-impoverished home. And two-thirds of low-income households own zero children’s books.
The research is conclusive that reading to a child strengthens the bonds between child and caregiver, increases school readiness and improves brain development. There is powerful science showing that rich, interactive household language is the key architect to early brain growth – a phase that cannot be duplicated once the child is an adult.
In accepting their award, Payne credited her board and the battalion of volunteers, donors and bibliophiles who came together to make the Cleveland Kids’ Book Bank a thriving startup.
But Margaret Bernstein, the director of advocacy and community initiatives for WKYC, sees it differently. She introduced Kovach and Payne several years ago as she passed to them the leadership of some 60 local Little Free Libraries. And she likened the women to two sticks of dynamite.
“What happens when you put two sticks together?” Bernstein asked more than 300 guests gathered for the annual celebration of human services. “Let’s all say it: they go boom!”
The audience echoed the word, even as Payne took one step forward and improvised: “Books!” she shouted.
Michelle Kuo, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, describes herself as a shy child growing up in western Michigan who rarely raised her hand in class. But her first book, a memoir called “Reading with Patrick,” has captured the accolades of two men who think deeply about education:
James Forman, who teaches at Yale Law School and is the author of this year’s “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.”
Arthur Evenchik, who coordinates the Emerging Scholars program at Case Western Reserve University
Evenchik and Forman have posted a 2,500-word book review on The Atlantic website, concluding, “in all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like ‘Reading with Patrick.’”
Patrick is Patrick Browning, an eighth-grader in the Arkansas Delta when Kuo, newly graduated from Harvard, showed up in the front of his class. The 22-year-old, a Teach for America instructor, was profoundly out-of-her depth but recognized in the often-absent teenager a sensitive and astute learner.
But instead of the laughable tropes — think Michelle Pfeiffer in the ridiculous film “Dangerous Minds” – Kuo finds a way to tell her truth alongside that of Browning, who was charged with murder while she was earning a law degree. Kuo returned south to spend seven months visiting Browning each day in jail, where they read Walt Whitman, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott and Frederick Douglass.
“In her penetrating, haunting memoir, ‘Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship,’ she confronts all the difficult questions that the teacher-as-savior genre claims to have answered, and especially this one: What difference can a teacher actually make?” write Forman and Evenchik.
The answer – and this review – makes a potent case for this new work.
The pages of Jesmyn Ward’s third novel, “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” smell of Mississippi.
Set in the same fictional town, Bois Sauvage, as her 2011 National Book Award-winning novel, “Salvage the Bones,” her latest fiction returns to tell again of family bonds, tested by unresolved trauma and unrelenting Southern poverty. She undergirds the sense of place with a seven-line epigraph from Derek Walcott’s “The Gulf.”
At the heart of “Sing” is Jojo, a 13-year-old narrator focusing on his budding manhood. His role model? Pop, whose days are spent taking care of his cancer-stricken wife, Mam, Jojo’s toddler sister Kayla, and to a lesser extent, his daughter Leonie, Jojo’s mother.
Ward, a Mississippian and Tulane University professor, excels with a narrative that knits together three generations with precision. So much is in the details: early on, she establishes Leonie’s place in the family with Jojo’s decision to address his mother by her first name.
“Sometimes I think I understand everything else more than I’ll ever understand Leonie,” he says to himself as he watches his mother fumble on his birthday with a tiny baby shower cake and “the cheapest ice cream, the kind with a texture of cold gum.”
Both Jojo and Kayla are estranged from their father Michael, a white oil rig worker turned meth dealer, who’s finishing up a three-year bid at the state penitentiary. But when he’s released, Leonie insists that her two children and a family friend make the drive to bring him home. An unexpected visitor joins them on the journey, heightening a fraught trek.
The bond between Jojo and Kayla is the emotional core of the novel. Even Leonie knows she is on the outside looking in. When she spies them napping together, jealousy takes hold: “…a part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don’t have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky.”
Her efforts fluctuate in trying to be the mother she thinks her children deserve: one minute she’s hunting in the field for a homegrown remedy to ease her daughter’s sudden illness, the next she’s gone missing, with no clue to her whereabouts. Despite this, and despite her drug use, Leonie comes off as a sympathetic character. Her chapters are frustratingly good.
One compelling character, Leonie’s late brother Given, could have used more airtime. He appears in the book mostly as a ghost, haunting Leonie when she’s high. But he’s a dynamic figure, even from the afterlife, and Ward could have tucked in a bit more of his life before his untimely death.
Ward, 40, writes to tell the truth or, as she remarked to the National Book Award audience in 2011, “so that the culture that marginalized us for so long would see that our stories were as universal, our lives as fraught and lovely and important as theirs.”
This month, she received two pieces of recognition for her storytelling: one, being named a finalist again for the National Book Award and two, a selection as a MacArthur Fellow, with its $625,000 no-strings-attached award. (She responded to the latter on Twitter with a Prince gif.)
Ward has a page-turner on her hands, a slow burn of a book that dives deep into the waters of the South, exploring race and class in the context of memory. Of everything that happens to us, what leaves a scar? What holds us hostage?
Those scars are on full display in “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” and its colors are heartbreaking – and beautiful.
by Charles Ellenbogen
Anisfield-Wolf award winner Adrian Matejka has produced another excellent book of poems. I chose the word ‘book’ deliberately. This is not a collection of poems, but it is, like The Big Smoke, a book. Generally, when I read poetry, I can read 2 or 3 poems at a time. If I read too many more, I can’t really give them the attention they deserve. This is not to say that Matejka’s poems don’t deserve careful attention; they do. It’s just that the book has such a narrative drive (see the transition between “Stardate 8705.29” and “Business as Usual” for an example) that I often had to remind myself to slow down.
Together, “Map to the Stars” tells a compelling coming-of-age story that involves a move to the suburbs (which means a move from Prince to Fleetwood Mac) and all that involves, notably the sometimes unspoken but always simmering issue of race. In “After the Stars,” Matejka reports that “Upward / mobility equals stars in every // thing” and that the persona’s new neighborhood has “One sedan per driveway / & one tree centering each & every yard.” But all is not idyllic in the suburbs. Matejka reminds us that “All of this dirt came from some / other dirt repeating itself & you stand on top / of its frozen remains, arms raised like the Y / in YMCA. Look at you now. You are high-fiving / yourself in the middle of a future strip mall.”
Throughout, “[t]he spacious myth of space” proves to be just that, a myth. There is a hope that “everyone looks the same / in a space suit” but they don’t. In “Outta Here Blacks,” Matejka notes that despite the move, some things didn’t change:
We were outside our chalk-outlined / piece of town like a bad pitch. // We were outlying that old spot // like perfectly spelled / gentrifications.
Still, there remains a somewhat empty hope for a fresh start. In the perfectly named “Record Keeper,” Matejka writes:
& because nobody / hunts for dinner in the suburbs, we put down / our implements of half step & appetite, sidestep / the moon as it descends into a whole plateful / of charred thighs and wings. We collectivize / the back-in-the-days way as tenaciously as chicken / legs undress themselves at a cul-de-sac party, then raise the stripped bones to history. Out here, there / isn’t any, so history is whatever we want it to be.
Charles Ellenbogen teaches English at Campus International High School in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
During Cleveland Book Week, the incomparable Isabel Allende joked at age 75 about her new boyfriend, and about her approach to literature:
“I’ve been writing for 35 years and I have no idea how I do it. I don’t have an idea of what the book is about until it’s published and I read the reviews,” she quipped in a talk on life and literature at the City Club of Cleveland.
She begins each book on January 8, commemorating the day she sat down at her kitchen table — a stymied 40-year-old exile — to begin a letter to her century-old grandfather. That letter poured out of her until it became The House of the Spirits, which launched Allende onto a global stage. It led to her being named this year’s Anisfield-Wolf recipient for lifetime achievement.
“Having a sacred day to start is like magic,” the Chilean-American woman said. “What began as superstition is now like discipline.” Her next novel, In the Midst of Winter, goes on sale October 31.
View her talk in full below and join our mailing list to be among the first to hear the lineup for Cleveland Book Week 2018.
Tyehimba Jess came home to Karamu House to lift up “Olio,” his magnificently engineered collection of poems that explore black voices in the decades from Civil War times to the start of World War I. Many of the poems can be read from back to front, at a slant and via every other line, in a welter of sense-making and sensibility.
A sold-out crowd flocked to the historic theater during Cleveland Book Week to hear Jess showcase the historic voices that flow through every page of “Olio,” which won both an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. He used a screen projector to show how the works unfold multiple meanings in varied directions.
As preamble, two artists from Twelve Literary and Performative Arts — Mary Barrett and Damien McClendon — recited their explosive original work, while Daniel Gray-Kontar opted for a nontraditional introduction to Jess, performing pieces from Jess’ first poetry collection, “Leadbelly,” with backing from the jazz band MOSHURO. Sponsor Lydia Munell of Brews + Prose praised the vitality of hearing poems in a cathedral, in a museum, at a boxing ring, at Karamu and in a planetarium – all sites where Anisfield-Wolf and her organization have collaborated.
“One thing I’m going to come back with is Cleveland knows how to throw a party,” Jess said. “Y’all know how to get down.”
View the event in full below and join our mailing list to be among the first to hear the lineup for Cleveland Book Week 2018.
Hundreds of Cleveland students joined author Margot Lee Shetterly at Cleveland State University in early September for a student-centric discussion of “Hidden Figures,” which took home the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf prize for nonfiction.
The gathering began with an original, soul-stirring interpretation of “Hidden Figures” in dance from the Tri-C Creative Arts Dance Academy. High school students, most enrolled in the Cleveland School of the Arts, performed “Hidden,” a vibrant period piece, choreographed by Terence Greene.
Shetterly then came onto the stage, thanking the students for carrying the work forward in a fresh medium. Three Cleveland Metropolitan School District high schoolers — Natalie Parsons, Kymari Williams and Darell Cannon — interviewed the author, probing on her advice, and her inspiration: “I wanted to give [the women of ‘Hidden Figures’] a star turn…for them to be as fully realized as stories we get about presidents and other famous people in history…I wanted that portrayal for these women and for myself and by extension the rest of us.”
John Hay High School graduate and Howard freshman Zephaniah Galloway closed out the program, reciting her 2017 “Stop the Hate” Maltz Foundation prize-winning essay.
Watch the event below — including the full performance of “Hidden” — and join our mailing list to be among the first to hear the lineup for Cleveland Book Week 2018.
Thanks to Wesley Lowery and his colleagues at the Washington Post, citizens anywhere can click on the newspaper’s “Fatal Force” webpage and see the running tally of people who have been shot and killed by police this year.
When Lowery, 27, returned to his hometown September 22, he looked up the number on his phone to answer a question at the City Club of Cleveland: 714. Less than a week later, it had ticked up to 730.
Last year the total was 992 and in 2015, when Lowery and his team won a Pulitzer for creating the database from scratch, it was 963. Despite heightened awareness around police shootings, despite the protests of Black Lives Matter, the number dying is steady. It is tracking to come in again close to a 1,000 deaths this year, Lowery said.
“It’s a pace of about three a day,” he told a sold-out crowd. “What is difficult is fatal police shootings are a relatively random event. Every year, you have police departments that have their first fatal shooting ever. It’s not a set of 12 departments doing most of the fatal shootings . . . You have very few departments that have double-digits.”
And with more than 19,000 U.S. police jurisdictions, a lesson learned about police use of deadly force doesn’t travel, Lowery said. He gave this example: when the New York City police discovered in 1973 that forbidding its force from shooting at moving cars cut citizen fatalities in half, that was good news for New York, but it didn’t disseminate.
Lowery, a self-effacing man who decided in a Shaker Heights middle-school that he wanted to become a journalist, drew strong reviews for his first book They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore and A New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement. Critic Dwight Garner of the New York Times wrote, “This book is electric, because it is so well reported, so plainly told and so evidently the work of a man who has not grown a callus on his heart.”
Lowery described his baptism into covering “policing and race” as accidental, dating to a spot decision by a Washington Post editor who sent him to St. Louis in the aftermath of August 9, 2014, when Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown.
“I thought this was going to be a very quick story,” Lowery said. “I’d covered police shootings before and I knew the appetite was small. I’d write a story and people would likely move on.”
Instead, Lowery discovered a crowd of perhaps 150 waiting milling in a church parking lot while some 800 people packed inside for a hastily called NAACP news conference. He started in with what he now characterizes as “quaint, naïve questions” asking residents to describe their relationship with police.
“What I’m hearing back are stories that are horrifying: stories of nights spent in jail for unpaid parking tickets; stories of people calling the police for help and ending up in handcuffs,” Lowery said. And even as he is listening, he is editing, discarding anecdotes as unprovable, weighing others with skepticism.
Back in D.C., Lowery and his colleagues went looking for data on police shootings and discovered no entity took responsibility to gather them. The best they could scavenge was a squishy FBI estimate of 463 killed per year, a number the bureau knew was a gross undercount.
“In a country that is obsessed with quantifying and counting, we had no accurate account of how often people were getting killed by police officers,” he said. “But we can tell you exactly how many people saw the movie ‘Get Out’ in Shaker Square and how many bought popcorn.”
The Post decided to track fatal force by looking for media hits, reasoning that on most occasions of lethal police killings a reporter would have filed one story. The team discovered that a quarter of the cases involve mental illness: “Our society solution to mental breakdown is to insert someone with a gun,” Lowery said.
Asked by the lawyer for Tamir Rice’s family about the paucity of convictions of police, Lowery was blunt: “We allow police to kill people when they get scared. Period.”
The Post’s examination of prosecutions found them exceedingly rare, and convictions close to nonexistent. Lowery recommended Jill Leovy’s groundbreaking 2015 book, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, as one key to pondering these complexities. He also likes Chris Hayes’ A Colony in a Nation, which published in March.
The reporter reflected back on his own incredulity during those first days in St. Louis. “I think if there is a lesson to this work,” he said, “it is we have to listen to our own communities when they tell us stories about the pain and the trauma they are in.”
The chestnut about journalists speaking for the voiceless also began to ring hollow, thanks to an activist who chastened Lowery: “There are no voiceless people,” he said. “There are only people who are unheard.”
The State Library of Ohio is making it easier for residents to read excellent books with ties to our region, including those from the Anisfield-Wolf canon.
Grant funds can also go toward the purchase of any book from the Choose to Read Ohio list, which builds two-year community conversations around books by Ohio authors and illustrators. One current selection is from Cleveland native Anthony Doerr, whose 2015 book “All the Light We Cannot See” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
The movement, of course, has its critics. The “They” in the title refers to some entities, most notably the FBI, which listed “black identity extremists” in 2017 as a terror threat. Perhaps surprisingly, Khan-Cullors spends just a paragraph on her direct rebuttal: “Terrorism is being stalked and surveilled simply because you are alive. And terrorism is being put in solitary confinement and starved and beaten. And terrorism is not being able to feed your children despite working three jobs. And terrorism is not having a decent school or a place to play.”
