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.
U.S. Congress member John Lewis is short and bald and unfailingly humble. Before he could say a word during a quick September stop in Cleveland to accept the Louis Stokes Community Vision Award, a breakfast crowd of more than 500 gave the 77-year-old a thunderous standing ovation.
Overhead in the Renaissance Hotel’s Grand Ballroom, the film trailer for “Selma” had spun out a brief, heart-clenching re-enactment of Bloody Sunday in 1965, when law enforcement officials beat Lewis unconscious on Alabama’s Edmund Pettis Bridge. The Canadian actor playing Lewis – Stephan James – appears in the
trailer four times.
A clip from the John Lewis episode of “Finding Your Roots” followed. It re-played the revelation that Tobias Carter, the Atlanta congress member’s great great great grandfather, had registered to vote in Alabama in 1867, after the end of the Civil War. “Maybe, just maybe, it’s part of my DNA,” Lewis says, shaking his head
in disbelief. “It’s just incredible.”
For writing about his own incredible life, Lewis won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1999. His memoir, called Walking with the Wind, got a graphic version update: March. This trilogy has reintroduced the Civil Rights movement for the 21st -century generation, and became the campus-wide reading selection at Marquette, Michigan State and Georgia State universities.
Steven A. Minter, master of ceremony for the Stokes award, called Lewis “a great moral leader in these troubled times.” Minter quoted Lewis from Walking with the Wind: “When I care about something, I am prepared to take the long hard road. That is what faith is about.”
Minter called on the audience to celebrate Lewis, the late Louis Stokes and the Fairfax Renaissance Development Corporation, which works to revitalize Cleveland’s historic Fairfax neighborhood.
“Revitalizing communities takes time,” said Executive Director Denise VanLeer. “It really is unique to get input from everyone in a way that no one is more important than anyone else. And that’s not easy.”
VanLeer said she loved hearing Lewis’ standard story about being a four-year-old boy preaching to the chickens in the yard of his parent’s farm in Pike County, Ala. In his mellifluous baritone, Lewis still preaches, delivering a few choice words for Cleveland: “Louis Stokes believed health care was a right for everybody. Growing up in rural Alabama, we did not have health insurance, we had burial insurance. . .We’ve gone a distance; we’ve made a bit of progress. But there are forces today trying to take us back.”
In the ballroom and on Twitter, Lewis urges: “Each and every person has a mission, a mandate and a moral obligation to speak up and stand up for those left out and left behind.”
VanLeer reflected on a recent example close to her, when a grandmother in Griot Village, the intergenerational housing in Fairfax, was asked to take in a fourth grandchild, an infant. The woman said she was too weary to begin again with a new baby, but her neighbors rallied to take shifts of childcare and the staff of Fairfax Renaissance rounded up clothing and supplies. In the end, the grandmother took that fourth child.
“It was a beautiful example of the community pulling together,” VanLeer said. “It is why we get up in the morning.”
Last week we celebrated Cleveland Book Week, a series of book and literacy-themed events surrounding the 82nd annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. From September 5-9, community events across Greater Cleveland honored this year’s Anisfield-Wolf winners and celebrated all things literary in our community.
Sept. 5 – We kicked Book Week off with a launch celebration on Public Square, featuring free children’s and young adult books from the Cleveland Kids’ Book Bank, free ice cream from Mitchell’s, and live music from Roots of American Music. The event showcased reading and literacy-focused nonprofit organizations serving Greater Clevelanders.
Later that day, 2002 Anisfield-Wolf fiction winner Colson Whitehead, who won last year’s Pulitzer Prize for The Underground Railroad, kicked off the William N. Skirball Writers Center Stage series at the Maltz Performing Arts Center.
2017 Awards Ceremony
The 82nd annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony drew a record crowd of more than 1,200 to the State Theatre at Playhouse Square to celebrate this year’s winners: Isabel Allende, Peter Ho Davies, Tyehimba Jess, Karan Mahajan and Margot Lee Shetterly. In case you missed it – or simply want to relive it – you can watch the entire ceremony.
Peter Ho Davies
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards 2017 fiction winner Peter Ho Davies discussed his groundbreaking book The Fortunes to a crowd at Case Western Reserve University’s Baker-Nord Center. That same day, Davies was announced as a finalist for this year’s Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Margot Lee Shetterly
More than 750 Cleveland Metropolitan School District students joined 2017 Anisfield-Wolf nonfiction winner Margot Lee Shetterly at Cleveland State University to hear about Shetterly’s research and writing of Hidden Figures. The event featured a performance of Hidden by the Tri-C Creative Arts Dance Academy, and every student in the audience received a copy of Shetterly’s book.
Karan Mahajan
The Professional Book Nerds podcast welcomed a live audience at the Cuyahoga County Public Library South Euclid-Lyndhurst branch to hear 2017 Anisfield-Wolf fiction winner Karan Mahajan talk about his novel The Association of Small Bombs, named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2016.
Isabel Allende
2017 Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement winner Isabel Allende spoke to a sold-out crowd at The City Club of Cleveland over lunch. The novelist, feminist and philanthropist talked about her life, work and politics, and took questions from the audience.
Tyehimba Jess
Brews & Prose and Twelve Literary and Performative Arts hosted an evening of music, poetry and history at Karamu House to celebrate this year’s Anisfield-Wolf poetry winner Tyehimba Jess. Another sold-out crowd flocked to this event to hear Jess perform poetry from his book Olio, accompanied by improvisation from local musicians.
Cleveland Book Week wrapped up with weekend events including BOUND: Art Book + Zine Fair at MOCA Cleveland and The Cleveland Flea: Cleveland Book Week edition, celebrating readers, writers, the art of bookmaking and more!
Thank you to all of our Cleveland Book Week partners, and the many Greater Clevelanders who attended Cleveland Book Week events! Be the first to know about Cleveland Book Week 2018 events and tickets by signing up to receive email updates here.
The list brims with astronauts and actresses, athletes and ambassadors, and a Nobel laureate in molecular biology. The only person to make the cut as a writer is Dove. Drawing from her years growing up in Akron, Ohio, she transformed American letters with Thomas and Beulah, her groundbreaking poetry collection inspired by her grandparents.
Dove mentions this book in the first sentence of her Time Magazine essay, which appears under the headline “Raising hackles means you are not being ignored.”
In the last paragraph, Dove, 65, writes, “Although I am not a confrontational person by nature, racism and sexism are still very much alive, and whenever I encounter prejudice, I tackle the issues and move on, refusing to be sidetracked by hate or bitterness. When I was a young poet, my work was considered ‘slight’ by some male critics. The sexist tone was undeniable, although difficult to corroborate.”
Brazilian photographer Luisa Dorr photographed the pioneers on her iPhone, positioning Dove outdoors, framed by what appears to be a tree in winter. Time Magazine editor Nancy Gibbs writes of the cohort, “Some striking themes
emerged – the importance of joy, the fierce motivational force of failure, the satisfaction of successes both achieved and shared.”
Dove shared a variety of that satisfaction of success in Cleveland September 7 during the 82nd Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, where she helped honor the newest honorees. She remains masterful in cultivating young writers, both as a juror and as the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
“Whatever I pursue – writing poetry or teaching or speaking in public – I want to be excited by the challenge,” Dove states, “curious about where life might next lead me.”
Two of every three Clevelanders read at the seventh-grade level or below – making 66 percent of adult Clevelanders functionally illiterate. This means it is hard to find employment, read a prescription bottle or discern a bus schedule.
At the nonprofit Seeds of Literacy, 920 people last year walked through the doors – and only 48 people, or five percent, had a ninth-grade proficiency or better. Ninth-grade-proficiency is the minimum education required for almost all job-training programs.
Cleveland exists in a literacy desert. As the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards expands its footprint into the community, are there opportunities to disrupt this grim landscape?
To ponder this question, members of the Anisfield-Wolf community shared a table with Seeds of Literacy staff and volunteers as part of the Cleveland Foundation’s Common Ground initiative, designed to foster conversations to build equity and resilience in Northeast Ohio. We broke bread on Cleveland’s west side and spent more than two hours discussing educational inequality, workforce readiness and national and state policy. The table of 12 hosted library staff, community volunteers, teachers and professors, staff from nonprofits – all working in sectors that might stem our literacy crisis.
For more than 20 years, Seeds of Literacy has worked to improve literacy rates among adults, offering free one-on-one tutoring in basic education and GED prep. The majority of clientele are 27-41 years old, and 88 percent live in poverty. They seek a GED or better literacy skills so they can move into a better-paying job. But some, says executive director Bonnie Entler, just want the personal satisfaction of accomplishing a goal.
“We’ll have people who want to do it for their kids,” Entler said. “One older gentleman wanted to learn how to read so he could read the newspaper with his wife.”
Denise Crudup, Special Assistant to the Director for Education and Learning Cleveland Public Library, said Cleveland is looking to other library systems for success in literacy programming, such as Philadelphia’s Culinary Literacy Center, where a commercial-grade kitchen serves as a classroom for math, science and reading lessons.
In the classroom, it’s about reaching students as early as possible, the educators around the table agreed. Charles Ellenbogen, a high school English teacher with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, recommended focusing on birth through age five and tackling the “word gap.” That chasm is the reality that children born into low-income families hear roughly 30 million fewer words than more affluent peers, a statistic that sets the stage for a lifetime of “catching up.”
“It just seems like the most opportunity is in early education,” he argued.
College English professor Michelle Rankins recounted a student who approached her at the beginning of a semester with great self-awareness. “I’m not prepared,” she confided. Rankins met with her frequently over the semester to help her grasp the material and was proud of the student’s effort, which earned her a C. “I’m not just here to teach them. I’m here to help them through life.”
Seeds of Literacy board member Gabe Crenshaw suggested this work requires a climate where students like Rankins’ feel empowered. “We have to remove the stigma of tutoring, of thinking something is wrong with you because you need help.”
If that stigma is breached, how do people find out about Seeds of Literacy?
Most often, it’s word of mouth, development officer Jo Steigerwald said. “Nearly half of our students find us through talking to their friends, family members. But they’re also finding us online.” Additionally, Seeds of Literacy also tries to have a presence in the local libraries, schools and churches.
Seeds of Literacy graduates spoke in June at their ceremony of the staff that checked in and beckoned them back on the long road to a GED.
Before adjourning, everyone at the Common Ground table counseled urgently. “What if we could go ‘All In’ for literacy?” Ellenbogen wondered, referencing the Cleveland Cavaliers’ rallying cry. “What would be the outcome there?”
This month, Adam Sockel and Jill Grunenwald, hosts of the “Professional Book Nerds” podcast, snagged a few moments with Colson Whitehead to discuss his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad. Their conversation covered the origins of his book, how Whitehead views his book in relation to the incredible success it has achieved, race relations throughout American history and a dive into the music he listens to while writing.
Whitehead, who won the 2002 Anisfield-Wolf prize for John Henry Days, is coming off one of his most successful years. The Underground Railroad was also selected as the winner of the National Book Award and Carnegie Medal. Oprah named it her book club pick for 2016 and “Moonlight” director Barry Jenkins is pursuing an adaptation for Amazon.
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 in to their 30-minute conversation with Whitehead, here below.
Peter Ho Davies – a gracious, wise and observant British-born fiction writer – welcomed a question about the title of his most recent work, “The Fortunes.” It won both the Chautauqua Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award this year.
Tentatively called “Tell it Slant,” a reference both to Emily Dickenson and a racial slur against Asians, the edgy title pleased both Davies and his editor. But it gave a large book chain pause. And Davies realized its tone fit just one of the four chapters – short stories in a way – that compose his novel.
Davies, clearly attuned to nuance, told an appreciative crowd at the Chautauqua Institute that he understood the booksellers’ reservations. But he is also intrigued by the phenomena of groups reclaiming labels originally meant to denigrate – “queer” in the LGBTQ vernacular, “suffragette” among feminists and sometimes the N-word among African Americans.
And the June U.S. Supreme Court decision greenlighting the use of “The Slants” as the trademark name for an Asian-American band fits into this language-subverting vein, noted the University of Michigan professor.
“The Fortunes,” Davies said, is a good titular fit: “It captures the Chinese interest in luck and it touches on questions of fate. It is plural, which reflects multiple characters, and it gestures at that most Chinese-American of tokens, the fortune cookie.”
Davies, 50, spent a week at Lake Chautauqua with his wife, novelist Lynne Raughley, and son Owen, to celebrate “The Fortunes” as the sixth winner of The Chautauqua Prize. It recognizes a book annually that contributes to literature and is a pleasure to read.
In four linked sections, “The Fortunes” considers a valet in the 1860s California Gold Rush, the actress Anna May Wong during the 1930s, the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin by a disgruntled Detroit autoworker, and the adoption of a Chinese daughter by contemporary American parents. Each protagonist is a fictional version of a historical figure, including the half-Chinese adoptive father, who has a cluster of characteristics in common with Davies himself.
“The book is an immigrant narrative caught up in an obsession of mine: identity,” said the author, whose dentist mother was Malaysian Chinese and father was a Welsh engineer.
“How do we find ways to get beneath the skin of history to tell someone’s story?” he asked. “I was lucky to come across a reference to a Chinese manservant to Charles Crocker, a baron of the Central Pacific Railroad often credited with bringing in Chinese to build the railroads. His servant, a valet I imagine, is Ah Ling, someone I think of as Asian Zero. And Ling becomes the first example of that problematic category: the model minority.”
Ah Ling came to stand for the burden of racial representation, Davies said, which led him to the famously beautiful actress Anna May Wong. The song “These Foolish Things” was written for her by one of her lovers.
“She’s famous for being Chinese but she is limited in the roles she can depict because she can’t kiss on screen. It is against the anti-miscegenation laws,” Davies explained. And once a white man was cast as the lead in film version of Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth,” it meant Anna May Wong could not play the role many considered her destiny: O-lan.
The third section of “The Fortunes” ponders the beating death of Vincent Chin, adopted from Hong Kong and mistaken for Japanese by a drunk Detroit autoworker angry over the 1982 economic downturn. Chin, 27, was buried on what was to have been his wedding day.
“We’ve all done this. I’ve done this. It can have comedic implications,” Davies said of mistaken identity among Asians. A reader once approached Davies to inquire if he was the Japanese novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who in turn was once asked if he was Jackie Chan.
In the final story, the act of adoption brings identify formation to the fore. “The book is hybrid in its form and is about people who are hybrid in their identities,” Davies said. Although he didn’t start intending it, form serves content.
Because everyone has multiple identities, people — especially of mixed race — must wrestle with authenticity: “Who am I? How do others seem me?”
Humor, a Davies trademark, helps a reader navigate weighty topics such as race. The interplay, he believes, lets in some light.
Viking, 207 pp, $22
In Zinzi Clemmons’ debut novel, “What We Lose,” grief shadows every page. But like Elizabeth Alexander’s “The Light of the World,” another examination of life amid a death, it is compelling.
A loosely autobiographical story, this book is about the pain of losing a mother. Like her protagonist Thandi, Clemmons, 32, is the child of a South African mother and African-American father, born and raised in Philadelphia with summers and long vacations spent in Johannesburg. And just like Thandi, Clemmons left college to help with her mother’s care in her remaining days.
“What We Lose” explores grief, cultural identity, politics, colorism, and love through stream-of-consciousness vignettes. A creative writing professor at Los Angeles’ Colburn Conservatory of Music and Occidental College, Clemmons conjures Thandi to express complicated emotional terrain:
“Loss is a straightforward equation: 2-1=1. A person is there, then she is not. But a loss is beyond numbers, as well as sadness, and depression, and guilt, and ecstasy, and hope, and nostalgia—all these emotions that experts tell us come along with death. Minus one person equals all of these in unpredictable combinations. It is a sunny day that feels completely gray, and laughter in the midst of sadness. It is utter confusion. It makes no sense.”
At its core, “What We Lose” is a novel about what anchors us. Thandi finds the answer shifts: familial ties sustain her in one period, the love of close friends in another. Once she has lost her mother, however, the greatest anchor of her young life disappeared. Thandi is an intriguing character, at once impulsive and afraid, searching for something to steady her: “Each day I feel less like the person I was the day before, my body hurtling so fast in one direction that my mind cannot keep pace.”
In short, searing sections, Clemmons makes us feel as if we, too, have suffered a loss. She dabbles with visual devices to hit different emotions; in one chapter Thandi draws a graph to mathematically depict her unrelenting grief.
A moving novel with few extraneous passages, “What We Lose” is a stellar read from an author with a strong perspective. She studied at Brown and Columbia, where she was mentored by Paul Beatty and helped found Apogee Journal.
Vogue’s critic Megan O’Grady hailed “What We Lose” as the debut novel of the year, suggesting Clemmons as the “next-generation Claudia Rankine.” Generous praise, but Clemmons’ first book indicates she stands on her own name, and her own merit, just fine.
Simon & Schuster, 256 pp. $24.99
In the midst of the book tour for her second memoir, “Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me,” Janet Mock spoke of the pitfalls of being labeled a transgender activist.
“There’s a burden of responsibility for me to show up correct — in my head, if I don’t do it right, then I’ll get shut out, and then other trans women of color will be shut out,” she told the New York Times. “I’m still grappling with all of that.”
If her second book is any indication, Mock, 34, is working out how to be the face of a movement wider than one lane. The New York City transplant has been near the front of the LGBTQ movement since 2011, when she published a landmark essay for Marie Claire depicting herself as a young, biracial transgender woman growing up in Hawaii. Her first memoir, “Redefining Realness,” came out three years later. In the years since, she addressed transgender topics for The New Yorker, Marie Claire, and The Advocate, and produced an HBO documentary, “The Trans List,” in 2016.
But she has also spoken in arenas that don’t hinge on identity. In 2015 she hosted “So POPular,” a weekly pop culture show for MSNBC and most recently, she became the weekly voice of “Never Before,” a Lena Dunham-produced podcast with guests like Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
If “Redefining Realness” dealt with Mock’s personal journey to finding comfort in her own body, “Surpassing Certainty” acts as a proto blueprint to “show up for that girl who is yearning to be let in, to be accepted,” she writes. “My twenties prepared me to be seen fully—in my own eyes, in the eyes of the people I knew and love, and in the eyes of the public I invited into my life to know me.”
Telling the story of her twenties, Mock shares universal milestones: moving away from home, finding a first job, falling in love. This book, which ends with Mock’s 30th birthday party, is a coming-of-age story in which the lenses are varied. Professionally and socially, Mock was not “out” for a majority of her 20s, a decision she made while trying to develop her boundaries: “I began to see disclosure not so much as an obligation but as a gift. My story was mine, and I felt a person had to earn the privilege of hearing it. Random suitors and passing dalliances were no longer deserving of me or my story.”
She shares her narrative in these pages unflinchingly, her title a nod to an essay from poet Audre Lorde: “And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.”
That truth is sometimes messy, as Mock introduces us to her first husband, a figure she omitted from her first memoir. Their four-year marriage, full of separation and estrangement, spans the majority of the new book, ending only as Mock gets serious with a new suitor, her current husband. The love life of transgender women of color has rarely been a mainstream concern, so Mock’s inclusion of this intimacy rings new and progressive.
Her writing is crisp and lyrical, and Mock is clearly influenced by feminist writers such as bell hooks. She knows how to fold historical context into her musings, whether it’s climbing the corporate ladder or dealing with micro-agressions at a predominately white university.
Mock echoes Lorde, addressing the women looking for guidance in her text: “I’ve reached a place where silence is no longer an option for me. My survival depends on my ability to speak truth to power, not just for myself. But for us.”
Viking, 207 pp, $22
Simon & Schuster, 256 pp. $24.99