ringShout

2011-10-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to find a good jumping point to bring the Occupy Wall Street discussion to the ringShout blog. There have been so many movements over the past weeks that have spiraled out from the initial Occupy Wall Street movement, but it is the recent group, Occupy Writers, that boasts some well known writers, poets and playwrights - Jennifer Egan, Salman Rushdie and Eve Ensler to name a few - that for obvious reasons I find pertinent to ringShout. To see the full list of writers who have signed on you can go to http://occupywriters.com/. Their statement is very simple:

We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world." Which seeks to show their presence through solidarity and give more visibility to the movement.

Author and journalist, Jeff Sharlet, who started the group, told the Huffington Post, "There are radical writers on the list, but there are also the kind of writers who maybe Bloomberg takes their books with him on a vacation to the beach. We wanted to say 'Look you've been outflanked. The movement draws as much from the people you consider to be your base." Giving the list a cursory glance, I did not immediately find any notable black authors (at least none that I recognized). My stomach did a small flip when I read the name "ZZ" and expected it to be followed by Packer, but instead read the name Claybourne. I have not read this author nor the book that they wrote The Predation Blues, but more power to them. My eyes finally fell on Alice Walker's name, who I most respectfully regard as a type of living ancestor. I was happy to know that she stands in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement, but I would like to see more black authors add their names to the list, if they do in fact support OWS in any capacity.

I feel that ringShout, in a way, is doing similar work that Occupy Wall Street is doing, providing a platform of visibility for underrepresented groups (in our case authors) in hopes of promoting discussion, trading ideas and creating a more balanced world - the book world being a smaller but equally vital sphere of society.

2011-10-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Tiphanie Yanique’s collection How to Escape From a Leper Colony is one of the best short story collections I have read in recent years, and one of my favorites to recommend. The Caribbean plays a central role, and is given new life on the page. Yanique weaves tales that utilize elements of magical realism to viscerally convey the mélange of cultures and identities that make up the islands.

Tiphanie was generous enough to devote a small window of her time to answer questions for the Greenlight Bookstore Fiction Book Group (held every third Tuesday of every month) that I thought would be nice to share here:

Migration both between the islands and to America and beyond seem to play an important role in many of the stories. Characters often leave to escape their past and return to confront it. Did the colonial history and nature of migration among the islands and from the islands play a role in this? Is it purposeful that there is a dual nature of relationship with the past, that it is both individual and societal?

Your question goes to heart of what I believe is a major emotional theme for the collection. In general, I'm less interested in the "you can never go home" narrative of migration. This might be because I've come of age in a time when the binaries of tourist and native are less, well, binary. Herman in “Kill the Rabbits”, longs to call somewhere home and when he lands on St. Thomas he believes that he has found his place. A big part of this is that his parents are there and that the woman he loves is there. The people make the place home for him. This is honorable. But he can't escape the history of the place, which is one of American colonialism. In fact, for the Virgin Islands, colonialism is not historical, it is the current reality. This social reality is not one that Herman, despite his personal love for Xica, knows how to manage.

I'm interested in the ongoing and complex relationship with people and the places they are from or the places where the end up. I don't think there are many things in our lives that are not both societal and individual.

What influenced the author's decision to make religion and faith such important aspects of nearly every story? Was it the islands' own complicated relationship with religion?

The Caribbean does have a very complicated and rich religious reality. My own personal upbringing was extraordinarily diverse. My high school was at least 25% Hindu but the school itself was Anglican. In my household there were Muslims, Rastafari, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians...and that's just the house I grew up in. If I go in to my extended family...hah! It gets wonderfully complicated.
Religion was rarely divisive in my family and friendship groups. When it was, I thought those people were losing out on the beauty of other people. Frankly, I thought the faithful who believed their way was the only way were either not very smart or just assholes.
I know religion has been a real source of tragedy in human history, but somehow I also feel it has been such a great source of beauty and intimacy. I grew up around faiths, so even as a child I saw understanding someone's religion as a way to appreciate that person culturally, romantically, intellectually. I suppose that may be one reason why it plays such a large part in my writing; it's a way for me to build and know my characters.

What about some of the elements of the book? Especially the title story, that seem "tall tale" like. Are these based on folk tales she heard growing up in the Caribbean, or are they largely her own invention? How has she used the stories of the Virgin Island and made them her own in her fiction?

It would be so cool if I could say that these stories were based on myths I grew up hearing. But alas, it's not that cool. These are largely my invention. However, grandmother, who raised me, was a children's librarian. She was definitely my first and most major story telling inspiration. She was the kind of Granny who read serious/literary books and told allegorical stories. Sometimes her stories were fairy tales she made up, other times she told us stories from her own life--but even those always seems metaphorical, allegorical. Those were her hobbies--reading and storytelling. I've always wanted to write serious books that might feel mythical or allegorical in the telling. She instilled that desire in me.

The book seems to have a extremely complex view of the relationship between parent and child. Mothers and fathers appear to be overbearing and distant at the same time. Was the author analogizing this relationship with any other types of relationships (e.g. native v. colonizer, immigrant vs. new national identity)?

The Virgin Islands is a colony of the United States. This status makes us one of the few colonies in the Caribbean. Yet, Virgin Islanders have very little interest in political independence. There was even a big song for Carnival with the lyrics: "let them know you're proud to be an American." This is very strange for a Caribbean island! And yet, Virgin Islanders have been fighting, for a generation, to gain native rights. We've been arguing in the news and over dinner tables for decades about who is really a Virgin Islander and what right "those Americans" should have on "our" land. While I cant' say that I was consciously connecting the parent/child relationship with the colonial relationship, I do think that, given the Virgin Islands' unusual colonial reality, it's a useful way to read the text.

On a personal level, I am very interested in love. I mean, I really believe in love. I'm totally old school over love. I think it's the only thing that ever saves us and I'm really curious as to how it works. I mean romantic love, friendship, familial love--all of it. But I do believe that it all starts with parents. Though both my parents are still living, my grandmother raised me. We were each others special ones and if there is such a thing as soul mate, then she is mine. But I still felt the absence of my biologicals. My own screwy relationship to "parents," along with my curiosity/belief about (for lack of a better term) the power of love has always been a major theme in my writing and likely a major reason I write at all.

2011-10-12T09:41:00.001-07:00

ringShout will be participating in the Festival of New Black Imagination taking place at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus this Saturday October 15th. For more information on panels, performances and directions you can go to the New Black Imagination's website at http://www.nbifestival.org.
ringShout has chosen to feature three short story collections: A Taste of Honey by Jabari Asim You Are Free by Danzy Senna, and How to Escape From a Leper Colony by Tiphanie Yanique. While the authors will not be there to read their own work, wonderful performances from the collections will take place. Leading up to the festival, the books will highlighted here at the ringshout blog. Happy Reading!

Three Books, Three Performances.

2011-10-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Danzy Senna’s collection of short stories, You Are Free, released by Riverhead Books earlier this year provides a window to a bevy of multiracial characters voyaging through an alleged post racial western world, “The election had come and gone, the blackish man was in charge, and the slogan on the bumper –Yes We Can—already had the feeling of some dusty, long-gone revolution.” Senna gives us her take on the multiracial experience in a cultural landscape that has become, in some ways, more level. Meet the Jeffersons. Meet the Cosbys, and the Obamas; forgoing the sass and patterned sweaters, and opting instead for strained marriages and relationships, women questioning their roles as mothers, and, for some, the angst of being middle to upper-middle class - an angle that is rarely portrayed with characters of color.
In the story What’s the Matter With Helga and Dave? A nameless narrator and her husband Hewitt hate the Cosbys for this very reason, “Hewitt and I both hated The Cosby Show with a venom and vigor –for its smugness, for the cloying sweetness of the vignettes pretending to be plots, for the surrealism of a rich black family who had no problem integrating into white America.” The narrator and her husband do not necessarily have a hard time integrating into their Los Angeles neighborhood. The are facing life as new parents and later dealing with the strange relationship that develops between Hewitt and their female neighbor, Helga. Race, in much of Senna’s stories, plays a supporting role to the main issues that her characters are dealing with.
In the Land of Beluah , probably the most disturbing story in this book, Jackie works at a temp agency where as the “lightest, brightest and whitest” (she is the product of a black father and white mother) she gets picked for jobs first; where, “Dark-skinned girls were always the last to go, no matter how fast their typing speed.” Jackie's break-up with her boyfriend Kip, who has left her because he claims she is not black enough for him, sets off something in her that can only be remedied through the abuse of Beluah, a stray dog that Jackie has taken in. Beluah, the bitch, as she is repeatedly referred to throughout the story, “The bitch was a mystery. She didn’t look mixed more like some breed that hadn’t yet been discovered,” becomes the manifestation of Jackie's self loathing.
In fact many of the women in these stories carry a degree of self-loathing while their male contemporaries are afforded the luxury of being light-hearted and without the same insecurities. While problematic, it is also understood that these stories are centered around female protagonists and the afflictions that effect women more so than men - though it would have been nice to read more self-assured female characters. You Are Free is a book definitely worth reading. Senna showcases how race is not exactly what it was or what it has been and is believed to be; especially as it pertains to people's lives, and how class and gender can be colored by it. Many of the characters are grappling to find comfort at having attained a certain echelon of social success, among other life's happenings and Senna conveys this through clear, funny and dark writing. She gifts us with complicated themes that should definitely be explored again and again.

Since You Already Purchase Books...

2011-02-13T22:26:00.000-08:00

For all you hungry readers who love to spread literature throughout the lands, here's a concept: Buy a book and have a book donated to a child in need! You already buy books anyway, so why not make it count?

Here's some information, directly from the source, about how you can help make a difference:

We have just launched a new website, NorthParan.com, that we hope will become a game-changer for black books and for children of color. We believe NorthParan.com is the most comprehensive home for black books and black authors that has ever been compiled on the web. The North Paran plan is simple: For every book purchased on our site, North Paran will donate a book to a child in need. Our slogan is Buy One, Give One.

We know how committed you are to our children and to our community, so we are hoping that you will be moved to join us in this campaign to get books into the hands of as many children in our community as we can. We are asking you to take the following steps to help our cause:

1. Forward this message to all the family members, friends and colleagues who you think would be willing to join us in this mission.
2. Visit NorthParan.com and purchase a book today.

By spreading the word and making all your book purchases at NorthParan.com, you can help get a book in the hands of every child in our community. If, for every book we bought in 2009, a free book was given to a child in our community, we could have given 4 free books to every Black child under age 10 in America. Let's make that happen in 2011.

Buy One, Give One.

Denene Millner
author | columnist | editor | contributing writer

Happy reading!

Winter Reading Land

2011-02-02T09:44:00.000-08:00

As the winter continues to rear its ugly head, I am on the hunt for some new reading material.

I've been thinking a lot about friendship, family, love and personal growth lately, and am therefore in the mood to read something that contains some, if not all of these elements.

During my search I discovered a book by the title "Farther Than I Meant To Go, Longer Than I meant to Stay" by Tiffany L. Warren. Upon doing some further research, I discovered that it's a national best seller and that this isn't her first book.

I'm definitely one of those people who judges a book by its cover, and I am completely sold on this one. I've ordered a copy and I'm waiting for it, but in the mean time I am reading a google books preview of it. I just couldn't wait for it! So far I am completely taken with the story. Since I haven't finished reading the book yet, I'll tell you what I know about it so far:

The main character, Charmayne Ellis, is a woman who is very successful in her professional life, but is still hoping to find love. She thinks that her lack of luck in this area has to do with the fact that she is overweight. Feeling desperate and insecure, she rushes into a marriage with a man who may not be right for her.

Oh yeah: based on what I've read about the author, God and faith will definitely play a role in this story. I'm not very religious, but a good read is a good read.

Happy reading!

Coffee Rain

2011-01-24T21:52:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading a book by Angie Cruz called “Let It Rain Coffee”. It was good. I mean had to finish couldn’t put it down please don’t try to separate me from my book, good. The story, the characters… everything about this book was well crafted.

It was so good that I thought it should be added to the ringShout booklist. And then I realized that it was already on the booklist.

This story follows Esperanza Colón as she embarks upon a journey from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico, and finally making her way to New York. In a way I think Esperanza Colón is like a lot of people, in that she just wants to live "The American Dream". That makes it difficult for me to hate her completely, even though she does many things that I don’t agree with. This novel has just about the right amount of drama, and I love Angie Cruz’s style of storytelling.

Angie Cruz is currently a professor at Texas A&M University and she is at work on her third novel. I am happy to share this read with you because discovering a new, talented voice is the only thing that I enjoy more than finding a beautiful pair of shoes.

So check her out.

Happy reading!

Seg-book-gation??

2011-01-07T07:05:00.000-08:00

There's a very interesting article that explores the differences between how books are marketed. More specifically, the focus is African American authors and White authors.

I must admit that this is something that I, as a black writer, have never even considered. I'm so concerned with telling a story that I never actually stop to think about who my stories have the potential to reach. This article raises some very interesting questions.

Just follow the link...

http://www.examiner.com/publishing-industry-in-washington-dc/seg-book-gation-with-a-new-twist

Happy reading!

Happy New Year

2011-01-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who lost 2009 by blinking? It was just here...

In any case, Happy New Year!

On that note, brace yourself for some happy reading.

Rebecca Walker wrote a piece about various black writers in LA... Follow the link---->

http://www.theroot.com/multimedia/writing-and-about-la-la-land.

Happy reading!

Celebrate Good Times, Come On!

2010-12-28T12:05:00.000-08:00

It's that time of the year that we've come to know as the "holiday season". Every time you turn around, there's some holiday or another to celebrate.

There's Christmas, Chanukah and Kwaanza, New Year... There's something for almost everyone. I don't really celebrate any holidays, but I don't really "not celebrate" them either, if that makes any sense. Case in point: For Christmas I went to my aunt's house for dinner, but I didn't do any Christmas shopping, send any personal (or mass) text messages wishing anyone a Merry Christmas, or really do much of anything that I've been trained to associate with the holiday.

I did, however, begin to reflect upon the holiday season as a whole and I did become curious about holidays in general. I started thinking about what I've been trained to think versus what I actually think and thought that I should probably do some reading. So I took to doing a google search for some type of literature that could help me put things into perspective.

So far I've come up with two titles:

The most interesting title of all is Santa's Kwaanza, by Garen Eileen Thomas. I ordered this at amazon.com. An African American Santa returns to the North Pole after Christmas and he and his family celebrate Kwaanza from the Twenty-sixth of December through the first week of January. A very creative holiday story with fun illustrations.

The other title that I ordered is Making Room In The Inn: Christmas Hospitality Through An African American Experience. I could only find this story on one site: http://www.c28.com/shopping/productdetails.asp?recordid=100229&adid=GBase. This is an Advent study celebrating Christmas traditions from an African American family's perspective.

I think the holiday season is great because in this country there are so many places that are closed and there are so many people who get time off from work in order to celebrate. Whether or not you observe any holidays, you can still see family and/or friends just because they'll likely have free time. That's something to celebrate.

Happy Reading!

For Colored Girls??

2010-12-13T16:49:00.001-08:00

I finally had the opportunity to get to the movies and see For Colored Girls. I don't know how to begin to describe how the movie made me feel. I haven't actually been able to decide whether or not I liked it.

I felt like there were far too many intense issues crammed into a tiny movie. Before I had a chance to really live with and think about anything happening that I felt should have been significant, I couldn't because there was something equally heavy happening in another scene.

Don't get me wrong; the actresses were quite brilliant... Then again, that was to be expected. I confess that I have not yet read the play, but if it is anything like the movie, I'm not sure that I need to read it. I'm going to read it anyway, though.

The movie left me feeling uneasy and anxious. And I couldn't help wondering why this was supposed to be for colored girls. Yes, all of these situations are things that happen all of the time. But did they really need to be happening all at once? Probably not.

Not to mention I really was not crazy about the way that the men were portrayed in this movie. Everyone has issues, but again, it was too much.

As I said, I'm not sure whether or not I liked it. I'm leaning towards no, but I'm willing to watch it a second time just to be fair.

A Long Way Gone

2010-12-06T18:22:00.000-08:00

It was very difficult to choose a book to pass along, but I read an awesome memoir recently. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by by Ishmael Beah. From the very first line I am completely invested in the story.

Beah chronicles his life as a child in Sierra Leone and discusses what it was like being a soldier at the age of twelve. I must warn you: there were many instances while reading this book when I had to stop reading because I was overwhelmed. In other words, I cried. A lot. You can read an excerpt by following this link: http://www.alongwaygone.com/media/ALongWayGone_Excerpt.pdf .

I'm going to give this book to one of my co-workers who I've started a miniature book club with. I think she'll read it. And you should too.

Happy reading!

Buy a Book By a Black Author Month??

2010-11-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

While reading a blog (http://welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/), I discovered that December has been designated as “National Buy a Book By a Black Author and Give it to Somebody Not Black Month.” My first thought was, “awesome!” My second thought was “why didn't I come up with that?”

I read about how the idea came about (http://welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/2008/11/buy-book-for-somebody-white-this.html) and I must say it is pretty clever. I'm always happy to share a good read with my friends, so I thought that this idea was particularly interesting. After all, how many non-ethnic reads have been passed on to me? It dawned me that I was being a little selfish by not sharing.

Since this idea is super cool, I decided to begin the search for the perfect book to buy for one of my non-black friends. I love the advice given on the blog: “white people already know about Toni Morrison, so please choose something else besides A Mercy.” I'll let you know which book I decide on.

I would encourage you to do the same. Sharing is caring... Happy reading!

Thanksgiving Already? Oh My!

2010-11-22T22:33:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that this year is practically over already! Didn't it just get here? It's that time of year when the markets are crowded, the temperature is dropping, and retailers are trying to sell you dreams of happiness if only you purchase this product at this amazing deal.

But more importantly, it is the week of Thanksgiving. I tried to think about what exactly that means to me. I came up with a lot of ideas, like a day to eat as if preparing for a famine, or a day to fight some random lady at my local super market because of her evil plot to buy out the entire pie crust section. Or maybe it's just an excuse to have some free time from work and spend time with the family you never have a chance to see. Or maybe, just maybe it actually is about giving thanks for everything that you feel lucky to have.

Everyone has a different take on what exactly this holiday means, if they believe that it means anything at all. For some, it really doesn't matter because Thanksgiving is just another day. Like it or not, it comes every year if you live in the United States. For others, Thanksgiving day is the best day of the year. Others still can take it or leave it.

In the eighth grade there was an ongoing contest where the principal would come up with a topic and students had the opportunity to submit their writing based on the topic. I entered the Thanksgiving week contest; the topic was The First Thanksgiving. I don't exactly remember every detail of the story that I submitted, but I do remember the basic story line: Thanksgiving was a holiday founded in Haiti by my family and it somehow made its way to the United States. Even back then, my Thanksgiving philosophy was that it can be whatever you want it to be. For me, Thanksgiving day will be a day of writing, being happy about being so loved, and purchasing a book that will make me happy (but only if I get it at an amazing price).

Happy Thanksgiving and happy reading!

What Donna Hill told Eisa

2010-11-18T19:49:00.000-08:00

Eisa Ulen also interviewed best selling author Donna Hill. See what she had to say:

http://eisaulen.com/blog///index.php/2010/11/11/interview-with-bestselling-author-donna-hill-about-what-mother-never-told-me

Happy reading!

The National Book Awards

2010-11-18T19:07:00.000-08:00

Eisa Ulen interviewed a few of the finalists in the "Young People's Literature" Category. Among them, Rita Williams-Garcia, author of One Crazy Summer and Walter Dean Myers, author of Lockdown.

Read the interviews by following this link:

http://nationalbook.org/nba2010.html

Scroll down to the "Young People's Literature" section and click on "Interview".

Happy reading!

Things Black Girls Do

2010-11-15T11:02:00.000-08:00

While checking Twitter the other day, I noticed that the number 2 trending topic was “things black girls do.” I don't know how to begin to describe the shock and disgust at some of the things people had to say about how they perceived black girls. It was as if every negative stereotype I've ever heard was resurrected and re-tweeted.

My first reaction was to try to counteract the negativity with positive tweets of my own. But let's face it: there's no way that one person could out tweet millions. So I've decided to dedicate this blog post to celebrating something positive that black writers do.

In my endless quest to find encouragement through literature, I recently stumbled upon a book called I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work byLonnae O'neal Parker. By sharing personal stories and lessons she learned as a mother, a black woman and a writer, Parker's words left me feeling as if she really is every woman and that I could be too. In a society where women often assume many different roles, it can be very overwhelming. Kudos to Parker for using her words to give inspiration.

Which books or stories inspire you?

For more information about Parker and her book:

http://scs.georgetown.edu/departments/11/master-of-professional-studies-in-journalism/faculty-bio.cfm?a=a&fId=1088

You can even email her or friend her on Facebook:

Email: oneall@washpost.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=573087684

Black Literature, Where Art Thou?

2010-11-08T17:46:00.000-08:00

After a hiatus, we're back to further the conversation around black literature. To that end, we'd like to introduce our guest blogger: Edithe Norgaisse, a recent college graduate and emerging African American writer who has agreed to lend her voice to our blog on a regular basis. Below is her inaugural post. We welcome your feedback!

I tried reading a novel that is a currently a best seller and realized that I was forcing myself to read it. If a million people think that it is a good book, it just has to be! I thought if I just kept reading it would get better; but it didn't. It wasn't that this book was particularly terrible. The problem was that I could not for the life of me relate to any of the characters. No matter how much of that story I read, there was no way I could never really escape into the novel.

And then it happened. While shopping in Brooklyn I walked past a man selling urban books for a price so reasonable that I couldn't afford not to buy them. Urban books! Feeling like a child in a toy store, I ran to his table.

I became increasingly disappointed after realizing that most of the titles available consisted of either raunchy erotica or a comedian turned “relationship expert”. But the type of stories that dominated the table (and that I was informed sold best) were more or less created equally: a young attractive materialistic woman + a young man who happens to be the top drug dealer during the height of the crack epidemic = a story of true love and dedication. A few stories that I tried skimming were so poorly punctuated that I couldn't help but feel offended by the complete disrespect to the English language.

Where are the stories that represent the average black woman? Where's the real black literature (the good stuff)? Is there really nothing worth writing about other than selling crack or how to keep a man? As a writer who is still crafting her voice, it is imperative that I have the type of literature that I can relate to.

So I'm happy about ringShout's dedication to celebrating black literature. Most of all, I'm especially ecstatic about the book list. Happy reading!

Make 'em Laugh

2010-04-11T20:49:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to bring you another salon after our successful Push/Precious/Erasure salon back in December (we hope that some of you used our salon kit to have your own!). We felt like we needed a little levity after the sorrowful Push so this time we've embarked on a salon with two sharply funny and insightful new novels: Big Machine by Victor LaValle and God Says No by James Hannaham. We wanted to offer some tools that we hope to use--and that you can use too--if you'd like to discuss these books--and the notion of humor in African-American literature--with some of your friends wherever you are.

First up: Salon 101. Detailed tips to throw your own salon, courtesy of Guilt and Pleasure .

Here's an essay about African-American humor by Paul Beatty to create a lens to view the novels through (It's from his book, Hokum: An anthology of African-American humor.)

And here's a bit about each writer: Victor on Wikipedia, an interview with him, and a piece from the Wall Street Journal. And if you want to hear from him, check out this NPR interview.

Here's James in Salon and a review from the Austinist (James got his MFA from the University of Texas in Austin.) And here's a sample of the kinds of online "ex-gay" testimonies that inspired the novel.

So check it all out and have a salon of their own--and if you want to spread it out, just do one book at a time! We'll let you know when the podcast of the event is up on the PEN website.

Mosaic Literary Magazine Provides Lesson Plans for Educators

2010-04-09T08:05:00.000-07:00

Ron Kavanaugh of Mosaic Literary Magazine asked me to write lesson plans for educators who are interested in utilizing the books reviewed in each issue. For free down-loadable copies, click here. And while you're on the site, subscribe to this very important literary magazine - one of the few left that focuses on the work of Black writers.

Joy!

Eisa

(Re)Making Malcolm: Manning Marable on Alex Haley, the Autobiography, and Writing Truth

2010-02-23T08:11:00.000-08:00

Please scroll down for an important interview. Thanks to Kalamu for spreading the word. Everything below comes form his NeoGriot Listserv (http://kalamu.posterous.com/):

*****
February 21, 2005

The Undiscovered Malcolm X: Stunning New Info on the Assassination, His Plans to Unite the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist Movements & the 3 ‘Missing’ Chapters from His Autobiography

On this the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, we spend the hour with historian Manning Marable who has spent a decade working on a new biography of Malcolm X. He is one of the few historians to see the three missing chapters from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” that he says paint a very different picture than the book with Alex Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Marable has also had unprecedented access to Malcolm’s family and documents that shed new light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI and possibly the CIA in Malcolm X’s assassination. Manning today called on the federal government to release all remaining classified documents on Malcolm X. [includes rush transcript]

40 years ago today on February 21, 1965 Malcolm X was shot dead as he spoke at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. He had just taken the stage when shots rang out riddling his body with bullets. Malcolm X was 39 years old.

At his funeral, the actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis hailed Malcolm as “our Black shining prince.”

Today commemorations are scheduled across the country.

In New York, the Center for Contemporary Black History and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University are sponsoring “Malcolm X: Life After Death—the Legacy Endures” an educational forum and radio broadcast. The program will be chaired by historian Manning Marable, founding director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies.

The historic Abyssinian Baptist Church is also hosting a national commemoration of Malcolm X with Percy Sutton, Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti, Dr. James Turner, Gil Noble, Rev. Herbert Daughtry and M-1 of Dead Prez.

Later this year, the Audubon Ballroom is scheduled to reopen as the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center on May 19 on what would have been Malcolm’s 80th birthday.

Meanwhile Columbia University professor Manning Marable is working on a major new biography on Malcolm X. Marable has already spent 10 years researching the book which is tentatively titled “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.”

Today Professor Marable joins us in our Firehouse Studios to discuss the legacy of Malcolm X as well as some of his new findings.

Marable has said “Malcolm X was potentially a new type of world leader, personally drawn up from the ’wretched of the earth into a political stratosphere of international power. And telling that remarkable, true story is the purpose of my biography.”

Marable’s research has raised new questions about The Autobiography of Malcolm X which was written with Alex Haley. Marable has also examined un-redacted FBI files which provides new insight into the role of FBI and the New York Police Department in the assassination of Malcolm X

We will be joined by Professor Marable in a moment, but first we begin with the words of Malcolm X recorded a month before he was killed. In January 1965 he gave a speech entitled “Prospects for Freedom.”

Malcolm X, speaking in January 1965 giving a speech entitled “Prospects for Freedom.” Courtesy of the Pacifica Radio Archives.
Manning Marable, one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars. He is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Columbia University, and founding Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies. He has been working on a new biography of Malcolm X for more then ten years. It will be published by Viking in 2008.

Rush Transcript
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, More...

AMY GOODMAN: We will be joined by Professor Marable in just a moment, but first we begin with Malcolm X himself in words recorded just a months before he was assassinated. It was January 1965, he gave this speech entitled “Prospects for Freedom.”

MALCOLM X: When this country here was first being founded, there were 13 colonies. The whites were colonized. They were fed up with this taxation without representation. So some of them stood up and said, liberty or death. I went to a white school over here in Mason, Michigan. The white man made the mistake of letting me read his history books. He made the mistake of teaching me that Patrick Henry was a patriot and George Washington—wasn’t nothing non-violent about old Pat or George Washington. Liberty or death was what brought about the freedom of whites in this country from the English. They didn’t care about the odds. Why, they faced the wrath of the entire British Empire. And in those days, they used to say that the British Empire was so vast and so powerful, the sun would never set on it. This is how big it was, yet these 13 little scrawny states, tired of taxation without representation, tired of being exploited and oppressed and degraded, told that big British Empire, liberty or death. And here you have 22 million Afro-Americans, black people today, catching more hell than Patrick Henry ever saw. And I’m here to tell you, in case you don’t know it, that you got a new–you got a new generation of black people in this country, who don’t care anything whatsoever about odds. They don’t want to hear you old Uncle Tom handkerchief heads talking about the odds. No. This is a new generation. If they’re going to draft these young black men and send them over to Korea or South Vietnam, to face 800 million Chinese. If you are not afraid of those odds, you shouldn’t be afraid of these odds.

AMY GOODMAN: Malcolm X, a month before he was assassinated. It was January 1965 at a speech he gave in New York, sponsored by the Militant Labor Forum. This is Democracy Now! We’re joined by Professor Manning Marable, one of America’s most influential and widely read scholars, professor of history and African American Studies at Columbia University, founding director of the Institute for Research in African American studies, again working on a new biography of Malcolm X. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MANNING MARABLE: Thank you. It’s always great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It is great to be with you. Why don’t you summarize for us—I mean, you have been studying Malcolm X for more than a decade now–what you think are the most explosive findings and then throughout the hour, we will tease them out and talk about them.

MANNING MARABLE: I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of critique of globalization in the 21st century. In fact, Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so many ways.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then when we come back, we are a going to talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the missing chapters, and where they are, which you have got a chance to see excerpts of.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to talk about how the autobiography was written, and the F.B.I., their relationship with Alex Haley. We will talk about these things and more in just a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We spend the hour today on Malcolm X, today the 40th anniversary of his assassination. Our guest is Columbia University Professor Manning Marable, writing a biography of Malcolm X, and also the editor of the magazine Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. The winter 2005 issue, photograph of Malcolm X on the cover, and that’s what the whole issue is devoted to, with a major article by Professor Marable. Let’s talk about The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

MANNING MARABLE: Okay. The—most people who read the autobiography perceive the narrative as a story that now millions of people know, and it was—it’s a story of human transformation, the powerful epiphany, Malcolm’s journey to Mecca, his renunciation of the Nation of Islam’s racial separatism, his embrace of universal humanity, of humanism that was articulated through Sunni Islam. Well, that’s the story everybody knows. But there’s a hidden history. You see, Malcolm and Haley collaborated to produce a magnificent narrative about the life of Malcolm X, but the two men had very different motives in coming together. Malcolm did—what Malcolm did not know is that back in 1962, a collaborator of Alex Haley, fellow named—a journalist named Alfred Balk had approached the F.B.I. regarding an article that he and Haley were writing together for The Saturday Evening Post, and the F.B.I. had an interest in castigating the Nation of Islam, and isolating it from the mainstream of Negro civil rights activity. So consequently, a deal was struck between Balk, Haley and the F.B.I. that the F.B.I. provided information to Balk and Haley in the construction of their article, and Balk was—Balk was really the interlocutor between the F.B.I. and the two writers in putting a spin on the article. The F.B.I. was very happy with the article they produced, which was entitled, “The Black Merchants of Hate,” that came out in early 1963. What’s significant about that piece is that that became the template for what evolved into the basic narrative structure of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Alex Haley know about this relationship?

MANNING MARABLE: There is no direct evidence that Haley sat down with the F.B.I. Nevertheless, since Balk was the co-author of the piece and it was Balk who talked directly with the F.B.I.—

AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley know—

MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley was involved in it.

AMY GOODMAN: Did Haley at least talk to Balk about—did he know about Balk’s relationship with the F.B.I.?

MANNING MARABLE: One can assume that Haley did because Haley and Balk co-authored the piece, traveled throughout the United States together and collected material together to form an article that they co-authored. It would be highly unlikely that Haley did not know.

AMY GOODMAN: Then the writing of the autobiography, Alex Haley and Malcolm X’s relationship. How did they do it?

MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of—

AMY GOODMAN: And why did Malcolm X choose him?

MANNING MARABLE: Over a period of about year-and-a-half, Malcolm and Haley agreed to work with each other. They met usually after a long business day that Malcolm put in very tired. He would get there at about—either at Haley’s apartment or they would meet at then Idyllwild Airport at a hotel, and Malcolm would be debriefed by Haley. He would talk, Haley would take notes. Malcolm had a habit of scribbling notes in small pieces of paper that Haley would surreptitiously pick up at the end of their discussions. Malcolm’s objective was actually to reingratiate himself within the Nation of Islam, that because he had emerged by the early 1960s as a very prominent figure outside of the N.O.I., there were critics within the organization that were saying to the patriarch of the N.O.I., the Honorable Elijah Mohammad, that Malcolm planned to take over the organization, which was not true. But nevertheless, Malcolm felt that if he could make a public—a prominent public statement to show his fidelity to the Honorable Elijah Mohammad that that might win him back in the good graces of the organization. But there were internal critics, sharp critics, who were very opposed to him, and who were very—some of them were members of Elijah Mohammad’s family, such as Herbert Mohammad, Raymond Shareef, who was the head of the Fruit of Islam, the brother-in-law of—the son-in-law of Elijah Mohammad. They isolated Malcolm X and kept him out of the newspaper of the organization Mohammad Speaks for over a year, which is kind of curious. He was the national spokesperson of the N.O.I., and he wasn’t represented in their own newspaper for over a year. Haley’s objective was quite different. Haley was a republican. He was an integrationist. He was very opposed to black nationalism. His objective was to illustrate that the racial separatism of the N.O.I. was a kind of pathological or a kind of—it was the logical culmination of separatism and racial isolationism and exclusion. He wanted to show the negative aspects of the N.O.I.‘s ideology, Yacub’s history, and all of the ramifications of racial separatism that he felt were negative, and that Malcolm, being as charismatic as he was, a very attractive figure, nevertheless, he embodied these kind of negative traits. Haley felt he could make a solid case in favor of racial integration by showing what was—to white America—what was the consequence of their support for racial separatism that would end up producing a kind of hate, the hate that hate produced, to use the phrase that Mike Wallace used in his 1959 documentary on the Nation of Islam. So, the two men for very different reasons came together. What is striking is that from almost from the very beginning of certainly by September and October of 1963, as the book was being constructed, that Haley was vetting—asking questions to the publisher and to the publisher’s attorney regarding many of the things that Malcolm was saying. He was worried that he would not have a book that would have the kind of sting that he wanted. He was also concerned, to use Haley’s phrase, about the purported anti-Semitism of Malcolm X, and so he began to rewrite words or passages in the book without Malcolm’s knowledge. And Haley, in his own—this is prior to emails—Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books. So that one finds in Haley’s archives, or the archives of Anne Romaine, who was going to be his biographer until her tragic death in 1995, one finds a copious series of notes from Haley to his editors and attorneys regarding the construction of the autobiography itself. He wanted to steer the book to accomplish his political goals, as well as Malcolm’s goals.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Professor Marable, you went to the Haley collection.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that experience and how difficult it is, really, to get original information about Malcolm X, and the Haley example is just one.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. One of the striking things about doing research on Malcolm X, and I believe that most Malcolm X researchers could tell you their own stories, is that there’s this paradox of the absence of critical information. Malcolm X is a person who has inspired—he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights. There are literally a thousand works with the title Malcolm X in them. There are over 350 films and over 320 web-based educational resources with the title Malcolm X, yet the vast majority of them are based on secondary literatures, that is, not on primary source material. In the case of Alex Haley, Haley’s material is located at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, primarily. But there are a whole series of elaborate steps that one has to—has to encounter in order to even begin to do research. There’s an attorney. If you want to photocopy material from that archive, you have to get permission from the attorney beforehand. You have to name the exact pages you want to photocopy before you can photocopy them. So that there are a whole series of steps. You can only use a pencil rather than a pen to copy down material, etc. It’s a laborious process, and it takes a long time just to do a small amount of research. Fortunately, Anne Romaine, who was appointed by Haley just before his death to be his own biographer—

AMY GOODMAN: She was a folk singer?

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. A folk singer and a skillful historian, even though she was not formally trained in the field. She collected her own parallel archive to Haley, and without Anne Romaine’s archive, which is also at the University of Tennessee—well, I should—let me put it in a positive light, with that archive, we have gained extensive knowledge about how Haley and Malcolm actually worked and how the book, the autobiography, was constructed. The raw material for chapter 16, a lot of that material, is actually in Romaine’s archives, not in Haley’s, which is interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Hmm.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. But what is most interesting about the book is that as I have read it over the years, something—something was odd to me. It’s like—you know, Malcolm broke with the N.O.I. in March 1964, and in that last 11 chaotic months, he spent most of the time outside of the United States. Nevertheless, he built two organizations in the spring of 1964. First, Muslim Mosque Incorporated, which was a religious organization that was largely based on members of the N.O.I. who left with him. It was spearheaded by James 67X or James Shabazz, who was his chief of staff. Then secondly was the Organization of Afro-American Unity. This was an organization that was a secular group. It largely consisted of people that we would later call several years later Black Powerites, Black nationalists, progressives coming out of the Black freedom struggle, the northern students’ movement, people—students, young people, professionals, workers, who were dedicated to Black activism and militancy, but outside of the context of Islam. There were tensions between these two organizations, and Malcolm had to negotiate between them and since he was out of the country a great deal of the time, it was rather difficult for him to do so. It seemed rather odd that there’s only a fleeting reference to the OAAU inside of the book that’s supposed to be his political testament. I wondered about this. It seemed like something was missing. Well, as a matter of fact, there is. Three chapters. Those three chapters really represent a kind of political testament that are outlined by Malcolm X, and to make a long story short, they’re in a safe of a Detroit attorney by the name of Greg Reed. He purchased these chapters in a sale of the Haley Estate in late 1992 for the sum of $100,000. Since that time, no historian, or at least I suppose I’m the exception, very few people have actually had a chance to see the raw material that was going to comprise these three chapters. The missing political testament that should have been in the autobiography, but isn’t.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is he doing with them?

MANNING MARABLE: Well, they’re sitting in his safe. And, I guess the conundrum—I’m not an attorney or a person who does intellectual property—but my understanding of the situation is that he owns the property, but he doesn’t own—he owns the physical texts of these chapters, but Mr. Reed does not own the intellectual property, the content of these chapters, so he cannot publish them.

AMY GOODMAN: Is this the same attorney Reed who is involved with, perhaps, a lawsuit to do with Rosa Parks?

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. It’s the same one, with the trial with the hip-hop group that’s based in Atlanta, and Gregory Reed—.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Outkast?

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right, with Outkast. In fact, I was even—I think even Reed sent something to me asking me to be a—to give testimony in this trial, which I promptly said, thanks, but no thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s because Outkast used in their music, they use Rosa Parks’s words, her own voice?

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: How does the family of Rosa Parks feel about this?

MANNING MARABLE: I cannot really say. I just know what I have seep on the media. I know that they weren’t very happy about this.

AMY GOODMAN: Happy about—

MANNING MARABLE: About Greg Reed’s representation, but—

AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s not representing them.

MANNING MARABLE: Well, again, I cannot really characterize what is going on with that lawsuit, because I’m not really a party to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, you are the only historian who has seen excerpts of the attorney Reed, the three chapters that he has in his safe?

MANNING MARABLE: I cannot say that for certain.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the few.

MANNING MARABLE: One of—I could say that very few people have seen it. Reed, after a series of conversations—Reed said he would allow me to see this. This was about two years ago. I flew out to Detroit. I asked when could I come over to the office, and he said, no, let’s meet at a restaurant, which struck me as rather odd. We met at a restaurant. He came with a briefcase, and he opened the briefcase and he showed me the manuscripts. He said, I’ll let you take a look at this for about 15 minutes. Well, that wasn’t very much time. I was deeply disappointed, nevertheless, in that 15 minute time, looking at the content, because I’m so familiar with what Malcolm wrote at certain stages of his own life and development, it became very clear that there’s a high probability he wrote this material sometime between August or September 1963 to about January 1964. Now, this is a critical moment in his development. In November 1963, he gives his famous message to the grassroots address in Detroit, which really kind of marks off the real turning point in his own development. But I would argue that equally important is a brilliant address he gives in Harlem in mid-August of 1963, which actually is one of my favorite addresses by Malcolm, which actually is superior in my judgment to the message to the grassroots address, where he lays into a critique of what then is being mobilized, the march on Washington, D.C., the pinnacle of the civil rights movement. Malcolm envisions a broad-based pluralistic united front, which is spearheaded by the Nation of Islam, but mobilizing integrationist organizations, non-political organizations, civic groups, all under the banner of building black empowerment, human dignity, economic development, political mobilization. He’s already envisioning the N.O.I. playing a role cooperatively with integrationist organizations. I believe that if we could see the chapters that are missing from the book, we would gain an understanding as to why perhaps—perhaps—the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the New York Police Department and others in law enforcement greatly feared what Malcolm X was about, because he was trying to build a broad—an unprecedented black coalition across the lines of black nationalism and integration. And in way, it presages 30 years ahead of time, the Million Man March.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable, we have to break. When we come back, I want to ask more about the chapters and also about the assassination of Malcolm X, 40 years ago today.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University, and long time now writing the biography of Malcolm X, which I see has just been bought by a publisher, and is going to be coming out in few years.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right, with Viking Penguin. That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: More on these three chapters, what you saw in the restaurant, and then let’s talk about the assassination of Malcolm X.

MANNING MARABLE: Alright. I think that Malcolm was envisioning, even while he was in the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist progressive strategy toward uniting black people across ideological, class lines, denominational religious lines, Christians, as well as Muslims, to build a strong movement for justice and for empowerment. And I think that that is what frightened the FBI, and that is what frightened the CIA. That is what they had to stop, and if one thinks about it, those listeners and our viewers who know the history of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program of the FBI that occurred in the 1960s and 70s, that in 1965 or 6, that J. Edgar Hoover wrote an infamous memo called the Black Messiah Memo. He said, “We must stop the rise of a black messiah.” That was the concern that the FBI had more than anything else. Either Malcolm or Martin could have played the role of a unifier, but it was—Malcolm as long as he remained within the Nation of Islam, talking to the converted, he did not represent a fundamental threat to the American government. But when he began to talk about uniting the very fractious civil rights movement, when he talked—when he began to negotiate with people like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and Martin and others, keep in mind that several weeks before Malcolm’s assassination, he went to Selma, Alabama. Dr. King was imprisoned during the mobilization. He went to Mrs. King, and he told Coretta that, you know, that even though we’re very different people, that we’re really about the business of the same struggle. We just use different tactics. And I want you to understand, and I want you to convey to your husband that I deeply respect what he is doing. So, Malcolm had a clear vision and an understanding that we were—that he was a part of a broad freedom struggle. As his vision became more internationalist and pan-African, as he began, especially in 1964, after seeing the example of anti-colonial revolutions abroad and began to articulate and incorporate a socialist analysis economically into his program, he clearly became a threat to the US state.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain how events led to this day, 40 years ago, the assassination of Malcolm X.

MANNING MARABLE: I believe that the evidence will show that there was not so much a conspiracy, but a convergence of interests with three different groups that had an interest in eliminating his voice and his vision. The first group, obviously, is the NYPD, the New York Police Department. They had their own red squad, which was called BOSS, the Bureau of Special Services. They had managed to infiltrate Malcolm’s organization and the nation of Islam. And, of course, the FBI. There were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only about half are currently available to scholars and researchers. I think that this 40th anniversary of the assassination is a good opportunity for us to say that now is the time to declassify all FBI material on Malcolm X. There really is a need for us to challenge the US government for its refusal to open up its own archives 40 years after the death of Malcolm. All of that material should be made available to all researchers and all scholars and to the family of Malcolm X. So that—I believe that the FBI clearly was concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm wherever possible. Gene Roberts, one of Malcolm’s chiefs of security, was an NYPD undercover cop. He later went on to bigger things by being a disruptive force inside of the Black Panther Party. So, that’s one element. A second element was the Nation of Islam. Lynwood X, who was one of the leaders of the New Jersey mosques of the Nation of Islam, was at the Audubon Ballroom sitting on the first row. He came in early to observe the events on the 21st of February. He was taken aside by Benjamin 2X, close associate of Malcolm and also Reuben X, Reuben X Francis, who was the chief of security. Lynwood said he just wanted to check out what Malcolm had to say. But my sense is that perhaps his role was more complicated than simply that of a bystander. We know from Talmadge Hayer, one of the men who carried out the assassination, who was shot by Reuben X as he tried to flee the Audubon after shooting Malcolm X, we know that Hayer confessed years later to his Imam in prison that there had been a walk-through a week prior to February 21st at the Audubon Ballroom. So, there was deep knowledge on the part of members of the Nation of Islam regarding the planning, in sight of the OAAU and the Muslim Mosque Incorporated regarding the events at the Audubon. They knew when they were going to be there, they knew what the schedules were. How did they know this? Well, in part because they had informants inside of the organization, and in part because, obviously, they had information that hardly anybody else had. They also knew something else clearly, that on the day of the assassination, and here we get to the third group—I think the third group are elements within Malcolm’s own entourage. Elements within Malcolm’s own entourage, some of them were very angry with some of the changes that had occurred with Malcolm. One source of anger, curiously enough, was that—was the tension between MMI and OAAU, that the MMI, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated, these were women and men who had left the Nation of Islam out of loyalty to Malcolm, but then Malcolm continued to evolve rapidly. He never renounced and never stepped away from a strong commitment to black nationalism and black self-determination. That’s absolutely clear if you do any analysis of his speeches. But what is clear is that he incorporated within the framework of black nationalism a pan-Africanist and internationalist perspective. In doing so, he began to reassess radically earlier positions sexism and patriarchy. He began to break with notions of sexism that he had long held as a member of the Nation of Islam, and began to advance and push forward women leadership in the OAAU. MMI brothers were very resistant to women such as Lynn Shiflet and others who emerged as leaders within the OAAU, so one of the tensions that occurred was around gender equality and gender leadership inside of Malcolm’s entourage.

AMY GOODMAN: Then, that day, there was the presence, or lack of presence, of the NYPD.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. The NYPD was ubiquitous. They were always around Malcolm. Whenever Malcolm spoke, there would be one or two dozen cops all over the place. On this day, the cops were nowhere to be seen. The cops later explained that they had been pulled off the Audubon in order to go across the street. Normally, they were in a command center on the second floor adjacent to the large ballroom in the building. On this day, there were only two cops at moment of the shooting inside of the building, but they were as far away as possible from the site of the ballroom. The man who actually apprehended Talmadge Hayer, the only shooter who was shot at the site, Thomas Hoy, was actually driving by by accident. So, clearly, they had been pulled off the case.

AMY GOODMAN: He was an off duty cop.

MANNING MARABLE: That’s right. Why did the cops disappear quite literally? Then there were other kind of curious things. There was a complete failure of protection of the principal. The MMI brothers, who provided security for Malcolm had been trained by Malcolm himself that inside of the Nation of Islam, whenever there is a diversion, you protect the principal. The principal, in this case Malcolm, clearly was not protected on February 21st. First off, nobody was checked for weapons as they came in. Now, of course, people know that over the last several months prior to February 21st, 1965, the OAAU and MMI tried to get away from the old practices of checking people at the door for weapons. They wanted people to feel more comfortable. But the guards themselves did not carry weapons. Now, Malcolm’s home had just been firebombed a week before. The guards didn’t carry weapons. Malcolm had insisted that the guards not carry firearms that day. I have asked James Shabazz, I’ve asked other people who are members of the OAAU, Herman Ferguson and others, what led to that disastrous decision? James Shabazz said to me with a shrug, you just didn’t know Malcolm. Malcolm was adamant, and that whatever Malcolm wanted, that’s what we just did. But I said, this is highly irresponsible considering that there were death threats that were constant, that there was FBI surveillance and disruption, and that none of you carried weapons? Well, that’s not quite true, because we later learned from unredacted FBI files, that we have discovered and that we have archived in the municipal archives here in the city of New York, that there were at least, according to the district attorney, at least three undercover cops who were at the ballroom that day. We know one of their names. We know that—

AMY GOODMAN: What’s his name?

MANNING MARABLE: Well, we know that Gene Roberts, who was depicted giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to Malcolm—

AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute.

MANNING MARABLE: Was an undercover cop, but who were the others? Two of the three men, who were imprisoned, Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and given life sentences, I’m absolutely convinced were innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been caught or punished. I think that now is the moment for us to rededicate ourselves to learning the truth about what happened on February 21st. The place to begin is to make all evidence public, and we have to begin with the federal government, and the FBI.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Manning Marable, I want to thank you very much for being with us.

MANNING MARABLE: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Marable is writing a biography of Malcolm X that will come out in a few years, has a major piece in his magazine, Souls, a critical journal of black politics, culture and society. Tonight, we’ll be at Columbia University talking more about his investigation. Thank you very much.

MANNING MARABLE: Thank you, Amy.

via democracynow.org

So What IS street lit, anyway?

2010-02-06T15:07:00.000-08:00

When literary writer Zetta Elliott found out that Library Journal wanted to review her book A Wish After Midnight for a "Street Lit" column, she said "No, thank you."

But rather than stay mad, she decided to learn more. She had a dialogue with the reviewer, a librarian who has strong views about what this controversial genre is and what it isn't.

Check out their conversation. It may surprise you.

A classic re-issued

2009-12-03T08:16:00.001-08:00

Check out this reissue of The Black Book. It's a key classic everyone should know--and just in time for the holidays!

We're proud of her

2009-12-03T05:23:00.000-08:00

Okay, we've gotta blow the horn a little for one of our own: Bridgett Davis's story, Lagos, adapted from her novel in progress, is in Narrative magazine. You can read it here for a modest donation. Yay, Bridgett!

Black book blues

2009-12-02T20:51:00.000-08:00

Bernice McFadden raised an interesting and troubling question in her blog a couple of weeks ago. Here's what she had to say.

You may not know me, or my novels, because I am a member of a growing band of African-American writers of literary fiction who are slowly disappearing..... I don't rightly know why publisher’s market fiction written by African-Americans ONLY TO African-Americans - but it has become common practice. And by doing this, they've placed all AA authors in one box forcing them to compete for the attention of ONE audience.
The word that has been coined to describe what is happening to AA writers is: Seg-Book-Gation

You can read the an article about her post here and her whole letter here

'Round the same time, Virginia DeBerry posted "An Open Letter to Oprah" on her blog, lamenting similar problems. Clearly, something's going on out there and it's not good. Yes these authors want to sell copies of their own books--all us authors want that--but they are touching on a problem that is pervading the industry right now. Don't want to just sit and cry but do need to think about where we go from here--and hey, Oprah's going off the air in two years. She ain't gonna save us.

So what will? Thoughts?

Need we say more?

2009-11-16T08:36:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post had a revealing profile of modern master Edward P. Jones this weekend. Check it out.

Push, Precious, Percival, "Pafology": A DIY Ringshout Salon Kit

2009-11-11T20:12:00.001-08:00

Here at Ringshout, we're all about people buying black books, talking black literature, taking black literature seriously. And heaven knows, folks is talking about Precious, which led us to thinking of the novel from whence it came. We here at Ringshout wanted to offer folks a way to get people together to talk about both Push, the novel that the film is based on, and Erasure, Percival Everett's novel that, shall we say, takes the publishing industry to task for the way that African-American poverty is portrayed.

On December 6, Eisa, Bridgett, Chris, Alison and I (and about 15 folks we know) are going to get together at my (Martha's) house and talk about these two books, the film and the way black pathology is played, overplayed, played with in these texts. We'll eat, drink and talk—and hopefully leave enlightened and inspired to do it again with another book and to read some more.
I can't have everybody over to my house but there's no reason you can't do this very thing where you are. All it takes is some space, a few bright folks and some good questions. The links below form a tool kit you can use to have your own Push/Percival Salon. We hope to put kits like this up about different books on a quarterly basis to keep the discussion going about books by African-Americans. If you do have a salon, we'd love it if you'd post about it on your own blogs and send us a link or post on our blogspot about it.

Here are some helpful links: Salon 101: Thanks to the website of Guilt and Pleasure magazine for this extremely specific, detailed and useful guide to how to put on a rockin' salon.

Bloggers speak: An interesting dialogue from Racialicious (thanks for that headline, guys!) and thoughts on Erasure from Janice Erlbaum's blog

Wikipedia entries on Sapphire , Percival Everett and Push

I'm not even gonna kind of try to list all the commentary about the film that's out there--folks done gone crazy!--but here are two pieces that represent the general camps of discussion. Pro: Erin Aubry Kaplan at Salon. Con: Armond White at New York Press.

And finally, some questions to guide your discussion of the books--here at Ringshout, we like to keep the focus on the books.

In what ways does craft function--or not--in both of these novels? How well do they succeed or fail as examples of the fiction writers art?

Is Erasure a successful critique of the publishing industry? Of Push? Of a certain kind of literature/writer? How so or how not?

Where do you think Push fits into the long tradition of narratives about raped and abused black women? In what ways is it honest? In what ways is it dishonest?

What do you think it is about Push that has so captured people's imaginations, both as a book and as a movie?

What do you think is to be learned from the enormous commercial success of Push--and the relative lack thereof of Erasure--about contemporary literary culture?

Let a thousand salons bloom! And let us know how it goes.

Penn State rocks!

2009-10-27T20:02:00.000-07:00

Just got back from a wonderful literary conference at Penn State called "Celebrating Contemporary African-American Novels since 1988" It was fabulous--the level of discourse, as the theorists like to say and the excitement about engaging seriously with literature was truly inspiring. This conference was particularly exciting because I, Mat Johnson and Alice Randall were all there as contemporary practitioners, mixing it up with the theorists. Here are some photographs and impressions from a fellow conferencee (and Penn State prof.)

Particularly impressive was the level of thought that went into the various papers presented--check out these abstracts. I was also in attendance at a panel on teaching Af-Am literature that raised interesting questions about how to engage with the place of hip-hop literature in the class room--does it have one? If so, what is its place? As uncomfortable as it might make some of us, students coming up have this literature as a frame of reference. They've got to be taught to look at it thoughtfully. Also interesting was a panel on pedagogy that looked at a number of ways that contemporary texts can be taught--I was particularly interested in the various approaches taken.

All in all, the conference was a beautiful thing. I can't wait until the next one.

2009 National Book Award Finalists

2009-10-14T13:44:00.001-07:00

2009 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTS

Fiction

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)

Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)

Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)

Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)

Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Nonfiction

David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the
Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)

Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates,
Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)

T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
(Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry

Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)

Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)

Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Young People’s Literature

Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)

Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar Straus and Giroux)

David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)

Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)

Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
Gore Vidal

Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community
Dave Eggers

^{The Winner in each}^category^{will be announced at the 60}^{^th}^{National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 18}^{. Satirist, comedian, and}^actor^{Andy Borowitz}^{will emcee the event.}

^{For more information about the Finalists as well as National Book Awards Week events, visit}www.nationalbook.org

^{Press inquiries, call Sherrie Young (212) 685-0261 or email syoung@nationalbook.org.}

Victor LaValle Reads His New Novel, Big Machine

2009-10-13T19:49:00.000-07:00

Feel free to come out to any and all events! It would be great to see you.

Victor

OCTOBER 14 6:30 PM New School
Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

OCTOBER 19 7:00 PM Barnes & Noble
86th & Lexington Ave - Writers on Writing: In Conversation about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man w/ Asali Solomon and Michael Thomas

OCTOBER 20 5:30 PM Rutgers-Newark
Paul Robeson Gallery, 350 Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard, Newark NJ w/ Salvatore Scibona

OCTOBER 27 7:00 PM Pacific Standard Bar
82 Fourth Avenue - Brooklyn, NY - between St. Marks and Bergen Streets. w/Robert Lopez

Novelist Sarah Wright Passes On

2009-10-12T14:18:00.001-07:00

We are mourning the passing of Sarah Wright. Her obituary from the New York Times is enclosed for your information and also her obituary from the Amsterdam News. Please save the date -- November 14th --for a memorial service to celebrate her life. More details to follow.

October 4, 2009

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sarah E. Wright, Novelist of Black Experience in the Depression, Dies at 80

By MARGALIT FOX

In 1969 Sarah E. Wright, a Maryland-born writer living in Manhattan, published her first novel, “This Child’s Gonna Live.” Issued by Delacorte Press, it portrays the lives of an impoverished black woman and her family in a Maryland fishing village during the Depression. Often compared to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, the novel was unusual in its exploration of the black experience from a woman’s perspective, anticipating fiction by writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

“This Child’s Gonna Live” was hailed by critics around the country and named an outstanding book of 1969 by The New York Times. Reviewing it in The Times Book Review earlier that year, the novelist Shane Stevens called it a “small masterpiece,” adding: “Sarah Wright’s triumph in this novel is a celebration of life over death. It is, in every respect, an impressive achievement.”

Ms. Wright never published another novel. She died in Manhattan on Sept. 13, at 80; the cause was complications of cancer, her husband, Joseph Kaye, said. Today “This Child’s Gonna Live” remains highly regarded in literary circles though little known outside them.

The novel centers on Mariah Upshur, the wife of a black oysterman on the Maryland shore. Set in the fictional community of Tangierneck in the early 1930s, it unsparingly depicts the hunger, disease, racism and hard labor that were the stuff of daily life.

Capable, sensual and fiercely determined, Mariah engages in an interior dialogue with Jesus throughout the book. In the opening passage, she prays for a sunny day so she can earn money in the fields, where the young potato plants “weren’t anything but some little old twigs and promises.”

Mariah is pregnant with her fifth child. She has already lost one child in infancy and before the book is out will lose another. She dreams of escaping Tangierneck, “a place of standing still and death,” and is adamant that her new child will live.

While novelists like James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison had explored the black male experience, Ms. Wright’s novel was among the first to focus on the confluence of race, class and sex. Republished by the Feminist Press in 1986 and again in 2002, “This Child’s Gonna Live” remains in print today.

Not every reviewer embraced the book. Writing in Harper’s Magazine in 1969, the critic Irving Howe called its style “overwrought.” But many others praised Ms. Wright’s densely interwoven poetic language, her deft use of local dialect and her ability to convey the extraordinary predicament of being black, female, rural and poor.

“It’s a very difficult novel in a lot of ways,” Jennifer Campbell, an associate professor of writing studies at Roger Williams University, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. (Professor Campbell wrote the afterword to the novel’s 2002 edition.) “It’s very, very painful to read: the pain of not being able to keep your children safe, of not being able to feed them properly, of not being able to give them two pennies for the Halloween celebration.”

Ms. Wright spent about 10 years working on a second novel but did not complete it, her husband said last week.

She scarcely seems to have had time. Besides working full-time as a bookkeeper, Ms. Wright taught, lectured and was a past vice president of the Harlem Writers Guild. She published critical essays; a volume of poetry, “Give Me a Child” (Kraft Publishing, 1955, with Lucy Smith); and a nonfiction book for young people, “A. Philip Randolph: Integration in the Workplace” (Silver Burdett, 1990). She was deeply involved in political causes, protesting everything from the Vietnam War to South African apartheid to the present war in Iraq.

There was something else, Ms. Wright’s husband said, that kept her from the second novel: the anguish of writing the first. For the story of the Upshur family, though its characters were composites, was in large measure Ms. Wright’s own.

Sarah Elizabeth Wright was born on Dec. 9, 1928, in Wetipquin, Md., a historically free black community on the eastern shore. Her father, like Mariah’s husband, was an oysterman; her mother, like Mariah, shucked oysters and picked crops. Sarah had nearly a dozen siblings, several of whom died in childhood. She began writing poetry when she was about 8.

After graduating from Salisbury Colored High School, Sarah entered Howard University, where she became editor of the newspaper. She left before graduating, her husband said, “because she was literally starving.” Her parents had no money to send her for food.

“When Sarah went off to Howard, they had no idea what it meant in terms of the financial requirements,” Mr. Kaye said last week. “They gave her oilcloth that they thought she could barter with other people to obtain what she needed.”

Ms. Wright moved to Philadelphia in the late 1940s and to New York a decade later. There, in a three-room apartment on the Lower East Side, she began work on “This Child’s Gonna Live.”

“That took such a toll on her, because she was forced to dredge up painful childhood memories that she thought she had run away from when she left the community,” Mr. Kaye said. “Death just seemed to be a constant companion in her childhood, and the spirit of death just hovered over the community.”

Besides her husband, Ms. Wright, who was known in private life as Sarah Wright Kaye, is survived by a son, Michael; a daughter, Shelley Chotai; three siblings, Wanda, Howard and Gilbert; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

She also leaves behind a box containing the manuscript of her unfinished novel, the second installment in a planned trilogy about the people of Tangierneck. During the decade she worked on the book, Ms. Wright never discussed it, even with her husband.

Mr. Kaye has not opened the box. To judge from the heft, he said, it contains several hundred pages. From a chapter he found elsewhere, the novel appears to concern Bardetta Upshur, Mariah’s daughter — the child who was meant to live, and did.

THE AMSTERDAM NEWS

Sarah Wright, noted author and activist, passes

By Herb Boyd

Special to the AmNews

Photo: Paul Robeson, center, shares a moment with Sarah Wright and an unidentified onlooker.

In Sarah E. Wright’s magnum opus, This Child’s Gonna Live (1969), her protagonist, Mariah Upshur, is in the process of wrestling with Satan before finding her special sanctuary. “I’m in your service, Lord,” Mariah prayed. “Clean my soul. Clean my mouth that I may speak your words.”

The Lord heard Mariah’s prayer in the same way He must have attended to Wright’s artistic quest because the novel is a prose-poem of beauty and eloquence that will have to stand since Wright is no longer with us. Wright made her transition September 13 after a prolonged illness.

A writer of extraordinary feeling and compassion for the downtrodden, a woman and activist of unwavering honesty and conviction, Wright was as committed to her writing as she was to the struggle for civil and human rights. Still, closest to her heart were the causes of peace and the liberation of her people.

Like her idol Paul Robeson, she saw no separation between her art and her politics—they were a unity of resistance against injustice.

Almost immediately upon arriving in Philadelphia in the 1950s from the Eastern Shore of Maryland where she was born and raised, and from Howard University which she attended, Wright immersed herself in the fight against racism and homegrown fascism. With her poetry and picket signs she was a constant presence along with those who demanded freedom and justice for W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and others targeted and arrested during the dark days of McCarthyism and the Cold War.

This determination continued with renewed fervor when she became a member of the Harlem Writers’ Guild, joining her considerable talent and integrity with John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, Grace Edwards, and Louise Meriwether.

In his assessment of her signature novel, Killens’ noted that it wasn’t a “pretty book,” but an “overwhelming metaphor of the Black experience…all the more powerful and truthful for having a protagonist who is a Black woman of unparalleled heroism in this white, racist, capitalistic, male-supremacist society.”

Together, as you might imagine, Killens and Wright were a formidable duo in the Guild, organizing seminars and conferences, conducting workshops, and the list of writers who acquired their skills and launched their careers under their stewardship provides a glimpse at the African American literary canon.

“Sarah was a great help to fledgling and established writers,” said Grace Edwards, a prolific author and current executive director of the Guild. “Whenever she showed up at our meetings, people paid attention because they knew she was a serious artist with a deep concern about their development. We respected her as a writer and her leadership, which was invaluable.”

Louise Meriwether, another stalwart in the Guild and noted for her novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, was equally expressive in her praise for Wright and her contributions to the Guild. “Sarah was exceedingly generous with her time and interest,” she said in a phone interview. “What a remarkable spirit she possessed. She was a very meticulous author and poet, very concerned about getting the right word in the right place. And she was a good cook.”

Wright’s ability in the kitchen was only exceeded by her work with the pen, something her husband, Joe Kaye is quick to confirm. “Yes, Sarah was a fantastic cook, but she could do so many things around the house; she could fix things and make things; her versatility was practically unlimited,” Kaye sighed.

“But what I will miss most about her is her unimpeachable integrity, her sense of honesty and always seeking the truth,” Kaye continued.

Some of the that truth can be found in her poetry, and her other books, including Give Me a Child, a collection of verse co-authored with Lucy Smith, and her biography of A. Philip Randolph.

A public tribute to her life and work will be held on Saturday, November 14 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Ethical Culture Society where all those who, as she did, believe in the possibility of achieving a “world worthy of human beings” may pay her tribute.

Marcela Landres Interviews Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa About her Debut Novel

2009-10-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

1. Saludos
While many Latinos have African roots, our literature doesn't always reflect
this. In addition to the glorious writing, Daughters of the Stone by Dahlma
Llanos-Figueroa is a notable debut novel because it represents a beautiful
and substantial addition to the legacy of Afro-Latino stories and storytellers.
To learn more, read this month's Q&A with Dahlma.

Helping Latinos get published,
Marcela Landres
marcelalandres@yahoo.com
http://www.marcelalandres.com/

2. Q&A
Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa was born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York
City. She taught in the New York City school system before becoming a
young adult librarian. Dahlma has won the Bronx Council on the Arts
and BRIO Awards, as well as a Literary Arts Fellowship. She lives in the
Bronx. For more information, visit http://www.llanosfigueroa.com/

Q: Which author or book inspires you, and why?
A: Isabel Allende and Toni Morrison are my greatest inspirations. They
use innovative and lyrical language to tell stories that help readers come
to a new understanding or connect them with very personal aspects of
their lives. I especially love the fact that their books can be read on many
levels and therefore can be revisited over and over again.

Q: Why do you love to write?
A: I love to write because I love exploring the lives of my characters. I
enjoy creating a world in which they can grow and share themselves with
my readers. Once they are created, they often take me in directions that
are new and totally unexpected. The outcome is a wonderful surprise and
a learning lesson to me.

Q: Who is your agent and how did you meet him/her?
A: My agent is Susan Schulman and I met her at the annual International
Women's Writers Conference at Skidmore. It's a wonderful environment for
supporting and inspiring women writers.

Q: What is your writing ritual?
A: I get up at the crack of dawn, light a candle and some incense, and do
my meditations. Often, my writing comes out of images that come to me
during this quiet time. Then I turn to my journal and record all the thoughts
that have come to me. By the time I get to my computer, I have already
done the most creative part of my work.

Q: Other than honing their craft, what advice would you give to Latino
writers looking to land a book deal?
A: My advice to emerging writers is to find a writing community. Given
the realities of writing today, our world could so easily become a
computer screen and a room in which we sit alone. I've found that while
these are important, opening myself up to the constructive criticism and
supportive response of other writers is just as important. Also, this is the
way to make connections and begin the networking you will need in the
future. Silence and contemplation is crucial, but community is as important.

ringShout's Martha Southgate Hosts Panel with Three "Young, Gifted, and Black (Male) Writers"

2009-10-04T07:32:00.000-07:00

Young, Gifted and Black Men: Writer’s Who Rock (In Brooklyn)

Posted By The Editors | October 2nd, 2009 | Category: Feature | No Comments » Print This Post

By Chinyere Osuala

There’s an exclusivity that Park Slope, Brooklyn boasts, that makes it different, makes it stand out. No, it’s not the strollers, or the young married couples, or the yuppie-ness, it is the amount of writers, famous writers at that, who call this affluent Brooklyn neighborhood home, including Jonathan Safran Foer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Pete Hamill. The number of cafes and writers’ spaces—even for kids—make this college-town-without-a-college a place where writers can thrive and focus on their next masterpiece.

This is the environment that esteemed Brooklyn writer Martha Southgate, author of Third Girl from the Left, thought would be a great place to feature innovative and diverse black voices.

Author Martha Southgate, left, presents the "Young, Gifted Black Male Writers" gathering in Brooklyn on October 1, with fellow authors, from left, James Hannaham, Clifford Thompson, and Victor LaValle. Photo: Chinyere Osuala

On October 1, Southgate curated the book reading and discussion,” Young, Gifted and Black (Men),” in the Old Stone House, a Park Slope recreation center. The featured writers were James Hannaham, journalist and author of God Says No; Victor LaValle, author of The Big Machine; and essayist Cliff Thompson, whose first novel, Signifying Nothing, was released in April. The event was hosted by Brooklyn Reading Works, a program that seeks exposure for emerging and notable scribes living in the area.

“I thought it would be really exciting to bring three African-American writers here,” Southgate said, “There are some interesting writers in the community, out there and I like to get them out there.”

The reading took place in a salon-like room inside the reconstructed Dutch-stone farmhouse located inside of Washington Park. Under its two-sided sloped roof, the lights beamed down on the thirty black chairs set up for guests and on the Trader Joe’s cheese and wine that host Louise Crawford, founder of Brooklyn Reading Works, made sure to mention on her blog OnlyTheBlogKnowsBrooklyn.com.

Please read more about Martha's evening with Victor LaValle. James Hannaham, and Cliff Thompson by going to TheDefendersOnline.com: http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/10/02/young-gifted-and-black-men-writers-who-rock-in-brooklyn/.

Reading List for Date With a Book's Caribbean Literaure Book Club

2009-09-28T08:37:00.002-07:00

Dear Booklover,

So many books, so little time!

This year, we continue to examine and celebrate the Caribbean experience at home and abroad. And we begin with Frantz Fanon's classic work, Black Skin, White Masks, which, though published more than 50 years ago, still resonates today.

In Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez delves into the perennial issue of integration/alienation, separation/belonging that is the immigrant experience.

Ekwueme Michael Thelwell brings Stokely Carmichael back to life in Ready for Revolution, a sweeping homage to the Trinidadian civil rights leader, activist and revolutionary.

Althea Prince disects love relationships in Ladies of the Night.

Alejo Carpentier shows us that those in positions of power can be brought down when they disregard the people who choose them to lead in The Kingdom of This World. Jan Carew strikes a similar note in his cautionary tale of greed and class conflict in postcolonial Guyana, Black Midas.

Caryl Phillips, In the Falling Snow, and Austin Clarke in More, echo the theme of separation/belonging, and Malcolm Gladwell shows us, in Outliers, how successful people can be when opportunities are given to them.

Hope you will consider lending your voice to this discussion this year.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

2009 – 2010 Reading List

October 18, 2009 Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon (Martinique)

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today. “[Fanon] demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images.” — Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review

November 8, 2009 Anna In-Between, Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad & Tobago/USA)^{** Elizabeth will be in attendance}

Traveling back to her Caribbean island home on vacation from her high-pressure job as a book editor in Manhattan, Anna Sinclair is predisposed to be at odds with the vast dichotomy between her two worlds. Not only does the languid pace of tropical life take some adjustment but Anna is perennially frustrated by the fractious relationship with her mother, taking quick umbrage at the hypercritical woman's subtle faultfinding. So it goes until the day when her normally proper and reserved mother swallows her pride and reveals the hideous lump that has deformed her breast. Shocked by her mother's life-threatening condition, appalled by her father's seeming indifference to his wife's deteriorating health, Anna struggles to convince her parents to return with her to New York, where her mother can receive proper care.

January 17, 2010 Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael, Michael Thelwell (Jamaica)

The firebrand civil rights leader who led the call for Black Power in the 1960s looks back on nearly five decades of protests and freedom fighting in this passionate, posthumous autobiography. In collaboration with his friend Thelwell (a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts), Carmichael, who died in Guinea in 1998, traces his path from immigrant child of Trinidad to charismatic U.S. student activist and unrepentant revolutionary. The story is told largely in Carmichael's own stylish, often thunderous, first-person words and is named for the telephone greeting that the author used for much of his life. It covers the full sweep of events that shaped Carmichael's life: his years at the elite Bronx High School of Science and Howard University; summers spent registering black voters in Mississippi and Alabama; personal encounters with such leaders as Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and Malcolm X; and his sudden decision in 1969 to relocate to Africa and change his name to Kwame Ture. Carmichael also addresses controversial issues that surrounded him as a young civil rights activist: his splits with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panthers, and reports of ideological struggles with the pacifist King all "[u]tter, utter nonsense," he insists.

February 21, 2010 Ladies of the Night, Althea Prince (Antigua/Canada)

Ladies of the Night is set in Toronto and Antigua. With women's loves and lives as their focus, the stories contain dramatic twists and turns: some humorous, others shocking and disturbing, all leaving a haunting melody behind. The Toronto stories capture the issues women face as they walk the ground of intimate and family relationships in that city. The Antiguan setting of some of the stories are reflective of Prince's insight into relationships, captured in her novel and essays. The characters reveal their different ways of managing a range of struggle, pain, rage, love and pure unadulterated joy. The humour of some stories complement the plaintive sadness and emotionality of the strings some other stories pluck.

March 21, 2010 The Kingdom of this World, Alejo Carpentier y Valmont (Cuba)

A few years after its liberation from French colonial rule, Haiti experienced a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror and superstition under the reign of the black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave, Ti Noel, The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime – built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French – in an orgy of voodoo, race hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.

April 18, 2010 In the Falling Snow, Caryl Phillips (UK/St. Kitts)

Keith—born in England in the early 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents but primarily raised by his white stepmother—is a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone. He is separated from his wife of twenty years (whose family “let her go” when she married a black man), kept at arm’s length by his seventeen-year-old son, estranged from his father, and accused of harassment by a co-worker. And beneath it all, he has a desperate feeling that his work—even in fact his life—is no longer relevant.

May 16, 2010 Black Midas, Jan Carew (Guyana)

Astonishingly vivid, bawdy, and tempestuous, this novel is a cautionary tale about greed and class conflict in postcolonial Guyana. Comparing ruthless 20th-century prospectors to the long-ago Spanish explorers who raped a continent in their quest for El Dorado, the novel follows the dreams and delusions of Aron Smart, a youth orphaned early in life and brought up on a farm by his grandparents who impressed upon him the value of an education. When Aron’s schooling is cut short after a reversal of fortune, however, he becomes deeply discouraged by his lack of opportunity and decides to follow in his father’s footsteps as a diamond prospector. He quickly becomes very rich—his companions in the mines call him “Shark”—and he is determined to use his new wealth to buy his way into the middle class. But Aron is out of his element in the world of property and prestige, and, cheated of his fortune, he returns to the interior, mining with a reckless madness that leaves him terribly maimed in an accident—and causes him to dream of returning to his grandfather’s life, built on the solid rhythms of farming and caring for the land.

June 20, 2010 More, Austin Clarke (Barbados/Canada)

At the news of her son BJ’s involvement in gang crime, Idora Morrison, a maid at the local university, collapses in her basement apartment. For four days and nights she retreats into a vortex of memory, pain, and disappointment that becomes a riveting expose of her life as a Caribbean immigrant living abroad. While she struggled to make ends meet, her deadbeat husband, Bertram, abandoned her for a better life in New York. Left alone to raise her son, Idora has done her best to survive against immense odds. But now that BJ has disappeared into a life of crime, she recoils from his loss and is unable to get out of bed, burdened by feelings of invisibility.

July 18, 2010 Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell, US/Can/Jamaica

Now that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."

** Elizabeth Nunez will be in attendance ***

____________________________________________________________

Marcia M. Mayne

Founder, Date with a Book®

Caribbean Literature Book Club

P 646.290.9212 : F 646.290.7088 : M 646.541.2543

www.datewithabooknyc.com

Find Yourself in a Book

Percival Everett gets his props

2009-05-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Anybody who knows me (Martha) knows how much I love Percival Everett's novel Erasure. It is a brilliant examination of just how black pathology has been marketed and merchandised by larger industries--and sometimes by ourselves. It shoots directly at at Sapphire's Push (now back in the news because of Precious, the upcoming movie based on the novel) and it scores--big time. It's also hilarious.

I haven't yet read Everett's latest I Am Not Sidney Poitier --out the end of this month--but it's getting great initial word of mouth. And if you haven't read this guy--make a point of it. When you talk about ambitious fiction by a contemporary African-American writer, he's one you should mention. Let's hope this book is his breakout.

Guest Essay: Clifford Thompson on Authors Doing it For Themselves

2009-05-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

Friend of Ringshout Cliff Thompson has recently self-published his first novel Signifying Nothing. It's both thoughtful and original--and by no means the first novel he's written. He's been working hard and skillfully at fiction writing for a long time and has had short stories and nonfiction published in numerous fine magazines and journals. But no major publisher would take this book. That was rough--until he got tough. I asked him to share some of his thoughts on the long and sometimes difficult road to self-publishing and he sent me this. In this rapidly changing literary environment, I think what he raises here is something we all need to think about. We'd love to know your thoughts.

In early 2005 I was lucky enough to be able to take a four-month, unpaid leave from my day job. My aim was to finish my novel, which I’d been writing until then at an average rate of a paragraph a day. A father of two, I have a very supportive spouse, or my little adventure would not have been possible. I was also lucky in that the four months went well. I immersed myself in my characters and in the constructing of the story, and I completed the manuscript. Signifying Nothing, as the novel is titled, follows what happens when Lester Hobbs, a developmentally disabled man who has not spoken a word in his nineteen years, begins shouting rhymed observations and memories – raps – of life with his family. The book is really about the family’s other members, who are forced to make life adjustments because of Lester, before and after he begins to rap.
It was when I tried to sell my novel that my luck ran out. I queried fifty literary agents, sending each a synopsis and the first page or so of the book. A handful asked to see the whole novel; of those, a couple thought it was “obviously a quality manuscript” (to quote one) but didn’t think they could sell it in the current publishing climate. I also made, or tried to make, direct contact with editors and publishers – twenty-eight in all. Some didn’t respond at all. One editor just didn’t seem to get what I was doing. A couple of others, like the agents, thought the book was very good but couldn’t see getting it past their marketing departments and didn’t feel up to trying. Still others liked it okay but offered criticism, which might have been helpful, if their comments hadn’t contradicted each other.
After all that, I had what I felt was a fine novel, and . . . well, not much else, except a decision to make. I could just forget the whole thing. I could go on spending $30 a pop to have the book copied and sent to this agent or that editor, hoping that one day, maybe, a publisher would call – and that I wouldn’t be too old and deaf to answer the phone. (I was already in my mid-forties – not old, but not young.) Or, instead of trying to change the publishing world’s collective “No” to a “Yes,” I could say “Yes” to myself. In other words, I could self-publish.
It is not always easy to decide that you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong. (Part of what makes it hard is the knowledge that mental institutions are full of people who have arrived at the very same decision.) But in the end you either believe in what you’re doing or you don’t. I did, and to prove it, I handed $600 to the print-on-demand company iUniverse. Before I knew it, Signifying Nothing was available.

Seth Meyers once said about landing a spot on Saturday Night Live that it’s foolish to view it as a culmination; rather, it’s the start of a lot of work. In a way, and on a much humbler level, the same is true of self-publishing a novel. Signifying Nothing now had a cover, which signified – what? If it was to mean anything, I had to get very busy to put the word out. So far, I have emailed everyone in my address book; started a Facebook account and tried to “friend” everyone I’ve ever said “hello” to in my life; made sure my book gets mentioned in the contributors’ notes for freelance articles I’m publishing; contacted my college alumni magazine; sought out readings; tried to get the book mentioned on literary and other blogs; and, most ambitious of all, started a blog of my own.

Part of the work for a self-published author, too, is readying yourself for the responses you get. Some people you tell about your project will offer a heartfelt, “Hey, that’s great!” Others will give you a blank look, or, worse, a smile oozing with pity or embarrassment. I find it helpful to remember that the content and value of the book do not change with each person’s reaction to hearing about it. And it is the book itself that matters.
Besides: the stigma attached to self-publishing, while not dead, is showing signs of grave illness. Part of it, I think, is that the Internet has blurred the distinction between traditional publishing and the do-it-yourself kind. In the old days, self-published authors (a few of whom went on to success) sold their books out of the trunks of their cars; but with the availability of print-on-demand books through the Internet, a reader purchases my novel the same way she might buy The Da Vinci Code. Gradually, the question becomes not “Did he publish it himself?” but “Is it good?”

I also feel that for black authors, self-publishing fits rather neatly into a tradition. African-Americans as a group are the original do-it-yourself people, making a way where none existed -- from the Underground Railroad, to the invention of jazz (and just about every other kind of American music), to the careers of self-taught and self-styled artists such as Melvin van Peebles, to one career path that led from community organizing to the White House. And until mainstream publishers begin taking more chances on what readers might like – a development that seems to be a ways off – self-publishing may come to seem a more and more viable option, a way for new and different works to make it into the light.

Final panel post--I promise

2009-05-07T06:58:00.001-07:00

So if you couldn't make it through the video, here's a little sum-up of the panel that I wrote for the website of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund The Defenders Online, edited by the estimable Stacey Patton. That big, honkin' picture of me? Didn't mean to bogart. That was the art director's call--I sent 'em a few things, not all of which featured me.

Colson makes the cover

2009-05-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

A rare event: A black American novelist on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. It happened in 2007 to Michael Thomas. And this week, to Colson Whitehead in a laudatory, thoughtful review by Toure of his newest novel Sag Harbor.

Whitehead's work, in particular, seems to bring out the philosophical in those who write about it, that which considers what it means to be a "black writer," perhaps because of his sturdy unwillingness to be pigeonholed, to apologize and because of his intellectualism. Sag Harbor is being hailed as his most emotional, "sentimental" book. You can see Whitehead talk about the book himself here.

We at Ringshout are also interested in Toure's call for more "post-black" fiction. Can it only be written by folks under 40 (a note from Martha Southgate: as a 48-year-old novelist, I like to think the answer is no)? What does it mean? Do we need to define it? Should we quit worrying about all this and simply write what we like? Thoughts are welcome.

And finally, James Hannaham

2009-05-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

Here's James Hannaham speaking--sorry you can't see him. He's a real cutie. But what he has to say is well worth listening to. His new novel God Says No is just coming into stores--it's well worth reading. Again, Emily Bernard and Stanley Crouch precede this post.

Stanley Crouch speaks on Obama

2009-05-01T08:11:00.001-07:00

Here's what Stanley Crouch had to say at our panel (Emily Bernard is in the post below this one, James Hannaham will be in the one above).

Day 102: After the Panel

2009-05-01T07:58:00.000-07:00

Our panel on Wednesday night was a raging success. About 60 or 65 people were in attendance to hear provocative, innovative, interesting discussion about black writing in the age of Obama, Obama as symbol, Obama as incredibly disciplined guy, Obama as name--all Obama all the time. The event lasted more than an hour so we can't post it as a whole (don't have that streaming capacity yet) But we have posted each of the panelists short presentations both here and on YouTube. (forgive the quality--but hey, at least you can hear it!) We hope to receive audio of the entire event soon and will share that with you as soon as we can. But for now, you can start with Emily Bernard's thoughtful comments about Obama as symbol. And don't forget, you can read our work (on a host of issues) in Best African-American Essays 2009

On Obama's 100th day, black books rule!

2009-04-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

If you're in or around NYC this Wednesday the 29th (our new Prez's 100th day in office), don't miss our panel on Black Writing in the Age of Obama at McNally Jackson books. It's a great store and a great line up: Martha Southgate hosting, James Hannaham, Emily Bernard and Stanley Crouch all offering up their thoughts. All have essays in the new anthology Best African-American Essays 2009 . Be there or be square!

Danzy Senna's Tour for Where Did You SLeep Last Night? A Personal History

2009-04-26T05:34:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles

Sunday, April 26, 2009 @ 1:30 p.m.

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Rolfe Hall 1200
With Jennifer Baszile and Lise Funderburg, moderated by Erin Aubry Kaplan. The panel is titled "Memoir: Bloodlines"

Thursday, June 04, 2009 @ 7 p.m.
Eso Won Books 4331 Degnan Blvd.

San Diego

Wednesday, April 29 @ 4:30 p.m.
UCSD Department of Literature
Vis Arts Performance Space
La Jolla, CA

Pasadena

Monday, May 18, 2009 @ 7 p.m.
Vroman's 695 E. Colorado Blvd.

West Hollywood

Tuesday, May 19, 2009 @ 7 p.m.
Book Soup 8818 Sunset Blvd.

Corte Madera

Wednesday, May 20, 2009 @ 1 p.m.
Book Passage 51 Tamal Vista Blvd.

Boston

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 @ 6 p.m.
Boston Public Library 700 Boylston Street

New York

Wednesday, May 27, 2009 @ 7 p.m.
In conversation with Rebecca Walker. New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fifth Ave. and 42nd St.
***Tickets for this event can be purchased online: http://www.smarttix.com/show.aspx?showcode=DAN48

Thursday, May 28, 2009 @ 7 p.m.
Barnes & Noble Upper West Side 2289 Broadway at 82nd St.
Los Angeles

Please click on the following site for more information about the book and for book tour updates.

http://us.macmillan.com/wheredidyousleeplastnight

And the big prizes keep on comin!

2009-04-20T17:44:00.000-07:00

We must take a moment to congratulate playwright Lynn Nottage , author of the superb Ruined at the Manhattan Theatre Club (if you are anywhere near NYC, don't miss it!), and Annette Gordon-Reed (who we just congratulated a couple of days ago for her Guggenheim on their taking home 2009 Pulitzer Prizes! Well done, sisters, well done!

Beyond The Skin Trade

2009-04-20T07:22:00.001-07:00

Check out writer Victor LaValle's essay in the latest issue of BookForum. It's a witty, slightly hilarious and oh-so-insightful answer to the probing question: Is black nationalism relevant in the age of Obama?

Better late than never?

2009-04-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

We'd like to (belatedly) congratulate 2009 Guggenheim Fellows Chris Abani, Jabari Asim, Annette Gordon-Reed and Terrance Hayes. Kudos to all--that's a tough one to get!

Tiphanie Yanique--remember that name

2009-04-16T12:04:00.001-07:00

Here at Ringshout, we love to celebrate the successes of young black writers who've got the skills to pay the bills (well, literary fiction doesn't pay that many bills but that's not why we love it). Anyway, we're pleased to announce that Tiphanie Yanique has sold her short story collection How to Escape from A Leper Colony to Graywolf Press for publication in March 2010. That's a long time to wait--if you want to check out Tiphanie's work sooner than that, check out her prizewinning chapboook The Saving Work from Kore Press.

These days Graywolf (located in St. Paul MN) publishes some of the most interesting African-American writers out there, among them Jeffrey Renard Allen and Percival Everett. And they're a non-profit organization. Are non-profits and small presses where non-best selling, non-white literary fiction will be found in the future? We wonder. Your thoughts are welcome.

A Good Read

2009-04-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

Check out OpeningChapters, a new website launched by writers David Haynes, Tonya Johnson and Rosalyn Story.

Their aim is high: to publish evocative sample chapters and long excerpts by black literary writers past and present. Each month, they'll feature one current, one classic and one "lost gem" of African American fiction. What's nice is that the site not only creates exposure for writers, but builds an impressive archive too. Gotta love that.

Felicia Pride's blog--check it out

2009-04-07T05:50:00.001-07:00

Felicia Pride, black book blogger extraordinaire, has just begun a regular blog on The Root. This first piece, "If We Ruled The World" is a witty examination of where book publishing is and where we are in it (I'm quoted, I'll admit, but that's not why it's good) Her blog is gonna be a regular feature. Add it to your feed.

One For The Poets--and the Prosers

2009-04-06T07:21:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, Ringshout is all about African-American fiction and nonfiction (see mission statement below). But our guiding light, our role model, an organization we absolutely love is Cave Canem (and executive director Alison Meyers is one of our founding circle and an absolutely amazing nonprofit exec, poet and all-round cool person) So if you're in NYC or know anyone who is, let them know about this event on Thursday. It's gonna be good. And if you're not on Cave Canem's mailing list, think about it. Good poetry is crucial--even to us prose writers.

Odds and Ends

2009-04-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

A few new and notable books on the horizon: First up, E.Ethelbert Miller's new memoir The Fifth Inning--one of our finest poets considers his life thus far, using the grand old game a a metaphor. Then in late May, there's Percival Everett's latest I Am Not Sidney Poitier which is a faux memoir of a guy who looks a lot like the famed actor. Percival is one of our most prolific and thoughtful writers--this one is sure to be worth checking out. Also due in late May is James Hannaham's God Says No, which is a hilarious and heartfelt debut novel. Full disclosure: I (Martha Southgate) blurbed this book--but only because it's fabulous! Pre-order and enjoy when it's available. We hope to have James in this space soon.

On another note altogether: We'd like to hear from you MFA students out there--What do you like about your programs and what would you change? What do you say when your mostly white classmates just don't know what to say about your work? How do you (or can you in the future) help each other out? Let us know.

Ernest J. Gaines wants to give you money

2009-04-01T06:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, African-American novelists with a book published during 2008--the Ernest J. Gaines Foundation has a prize for you. Go here to find out details.

RIP John Hope Franklin

2009-03-26T07:43:00.000-07:00

As everyone knows by now, Dr. John Hope Franklin has died. You can leave a message of condolence or thoughts about the man here. Everyone should take a moment to remember this African-American historian, writer and hero. Tayari Jones has a nice reminiscence on her blog.

Obama on my mind

2009-03-25T11:56:00.000-07:00

Claudia over at The Bottom of Heaven hipped me to this blog :Literary Obama. I have been quite struck by the degree to which the Obamas have inspired the creation of artwork of all kinds. For my part, I've found myself thinking of Barack and Michelle as I work on my new novel, which features an African-American character who (like myself) was educated at a prep school. I know the similarities between my background and Michelle's are a big part of why I love her so much. But I've been wondering what other folks are thinking. Are you finding the Obamas popping up in your imaginative life? How? We'd love to know.

What blogs should we be linking to?

2009-03-18T08:57:00.001-07:00

Hey Ringshout community,

We started our blog roll--but like we keep saying, we don't know everything. Let us know blogs that deal with high-quality African-American literature that we ought to have on our roll. Throw 'em down there in the comments section. Thanks!

Oxford American gets black

2009-03-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

Check out the Oxford American issue on Race--lots of exciting voices, both new (Solon Timothy Woodward and Jamey Hatley, among others) and more established (ZZ Packer and John Holman and other folks).

Sign Of The Times

2009-03-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

Since I wrote in TheRoot.com last year about why we should use the "L" word when describing black literary works, I've been thinking more about the need to name things. Do we really need to be so overt? No one ever sees signs that say, "literary white fiction", after all.

Yet, when I'm driving upstate with my family along a familiar highway, I often see those bright orange detour signs that let you know the road is under construction, that changes are going on, and that you have to turn here to get where you want to go.

That's how I think of black literary works these days -- under construction. It's not like it was, back in the day when the very fact that a black writer was published meant that a vetting process had occurred and the work was of a certain ambition and quality. Morrison, Walker, Baldwin, Bambara, et al,, had to be good or their books wouldn't be in print. Not so true now. All kinds of black books are getting published -- literary, yes, but also pulp fiction, genre fiction, popular and street. Some of that work is ambitious and some of it's not. So how does a reader inch through the pile up?

Road signs.

Labeling something as "black literary fiction/non-fiction" is a corrective, a temporary measure for the particular times that we're in. Just like on a highway, at some point the signs will be removed when the new thing is in place. Meanwhile signage helps. It helps the reader navigate a bookstore; it helps the bookstore promote certain kinds of work; it helps young African American writers aspire to have their own books in that section of the bookstore; it helps professors of AA lit discover new books they can add to their syllabi; and it helps publishers clarify what it is they're publishing. Voila! Everyone's expectations get managed.

I think of labeling as a navigational device, a GPS of black literary works.

RingShout itself is a road sign. We want to identify ambitious work by black writers so there's no mystery about what it is, no claim that it doesn't exist or can't be found, no excuse to let it linger on the shadowy back roads of our culture.

I certainly wish, as an emerging writer, I'd had some kind of tool to help me navigate my way -- nothing like a good road sign to get you where you want to go. Or need to be.

Bridgett M. Davis

Mr. Johnson's Syllabus

2009-03-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here's the kind of thing that Ringshout hopes to inspire--it's all about us talking to each other!

Andy Johnson, an MFA student and instructor at the University of Alabama came up to me after our AWP panel. We talked a bit about ways to get the word out about our literature and about what Ringshout might accomplish. And then he took our conversation home and made it work! Here's what he posted on our Facebook page:

"After our conversation, I developed a syllabus for this course and submitted it. (no word yet) Here are my texts:(readings)

The Portable Promised Land, Toure

The Known World, Edward P. Jones

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

The Fall of Rome, Martha Southgate

Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey

Hoops, Major Jackson

Fahanomeon, Fahamou Pecou

Anxious Objects: Willie Cole’s Favorite Brands, Patterson Sims

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama

Truth: Red, White, and Black, Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

What is the What, Dave Eggers, with Valentino Achak Cheng

(Viewings)

Tsotsi

Chapelle’s Show

The Queens of Comedy

Def Poetry Jam

When the Levees Broke

The Boondocks

(listenings)

The New Danger, Mos Def

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Lauryn Hill

He still hasn't heard whether or not the course is approved but let's hope so--send encouragement to him via FB or leaving comments here or on his blog. And please use this to inspire you--what works by African-American writers would you want to teach/see taught?

Working with our future leaders

2009-03-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

This past Tuesday, I began volunteering as a writing coach at The Posse Foundation, a remarkable youth development group. I met 11 really terrific kids, almost all black and/or Hispanic, who are going to be the leaders of the next generation. What's so terrific about Posse is that they find kids who are potentially strong leaders, put them through a demanding application process and then at the end of it, working in concert with several colleges, provide the students with a full 4-year scholarship! I'm working with the Babson College posse. What's more, the kids attend as a cohort and spend the 9 months prior to college entrance building community and learning what it will take for them to succeed in college.

What does this have to do with Ringshout, you ask? Well, I believe that this kind of volunteering, using our writing skills, is the kind of thing that will let the next generation know that there are black writers out there, doing their thing and caring what happens to the next generation. It's a minimal commitment--6 sessions--but it has big payoffs. Posse Foundation has offices in New York, DC, Atlanta, LA and Boston. To learn more you can email info@possefoundation.org .

AWP panel

2009-02-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

Long, long time, no activity. But after some births in the families of our founding circle--congrats to new mom for the second time, Bridgett Davis, new grandma, Alison Meyers, new dad Chris Jackson and new mom Eisa Ulen, we're back (me, I'm not having any more kids--I adore the two I've got but two's my limit!)

On Friday February 13th, Chris, Bridgett, Alison and I presented a panel at the 2009 AWP called "Forming Ringshout: A Place for Black Literature" I briefly spoke about how we got started: the article I wrote, the huge response in the blogosphere and the desire to turn it into something more. Bridgett spoke forcefully about an issue that she raised in her piece on The Root some months ago: the need for us to embrace the term "literary" fiction and to make clear demarcations in the types of writing that's out there by African-Americans. And finally Chris Jackson spoke brilliantly (if chillingly) about what lies ahead for publishing. Basically, as he put it, any industry that relies on "people to pay for words" is in grave danger right now and it's up to us to figure out how we're going to meet this challenge. And like always--if it's tough for white folks, it's tougher for us.

Again: here's our mission: Founded in 2007 by a group of writers, editors and booksellers,ringShout: A Place for Black Literature is dedicated to recognizing, reclaiming and celebrating excellence in contemporary literary fiction and nonfiction by black writers in the United States.

What we’re not: A litmag, a writer’s conference, a prize. What we hope to be: a new paradigm that primarily uses the internet to promote our mission (see below). Through a website ,a Facebook group (join up!) and public events, we want to give those of any race, creed or color, who are interested in contemporary African-American literature of quality a place to find the blogs, connect with others who share their interest, find titles they don’t know about (and buy them! Form book groups and salons to read and discuss them!) and hopefully, invite a larger community to become more aware of the richness there as well as strengthen our own ties.

Also critical is that it not just be the four of us in the founding circle throwing events in NYC and holding forth. Ringshout is you! If you have an idea for a salon or panel, if you want to form a book club using our mandate, if you want to curate an event write to us at theringshout@gmail.com and if it fits our mission, we will get the word out via our facebook page and our website. We want to become the go-to area for African-American literature—a place that’s both real and virtual.

What do you think? What are your ideas? Let us know. And look out for Chris and Bridgett's thoughts about this going forward.

Our books are for everyone--Barack-style

2008-02-11T06:47:00.000-08:00

Martha Southgate here. Here's another thought I want to share. In my mind, part of how RingShout can carry out its mission in addition to building community among and for African-American writers of some seriousness and ambition (although we like to party!) would be the notion of broadening who we include in that community. I don't want to to only talk to or talk about reaching black readers. The best of our work is literature--period--and people of all races can and should profit by reading it. Our experience is a crucial part of the American experience, after all. I believe that key to carrying forth RingShout's mission is that we work hand-in-hand with the"mainstream." I mean, hey, Barack Obama wouldn't be running as strongly as he is if he only talked to black people--he stands strong as a black man who will speak to everyone, without compromising or hiding his race. But he's not running on it either. I want RingShout to do the same, literarily speaking.

Black books of quality--we're writing about it

2008-02-11T06:17:00.000-08:00

The founding circle of RingShout has been busy moving the conversation forward about the place of literary fiction and non-fiction by black folks in the current landscape. Besides my piece, "Writers Like Me," which got us started, Eisa Ulen has written "The Naked Truth" which appears in the Winter 2008 issue of The Crisis Magazine--you can read it in its entirety on her blog here. And Bridgett Davis appears today on The Root.com with her piece, "The L-Word." Check 'em out and join the conversation.

Party all the time!

2008-02-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

The RingShout launch party on February 1 was a blast. This party with a purpose drew more than 100 eager and interested folks. The ideas and the fun flew fast and furious. After taking a little breather, the founding circle is getting together on the 21st to cull the ideas and begin to reach out for assistance as we move forward. For now, here's a pic of us taken by the fabulous Sarah McNally--thanks Sarah! (I'm clearly the RingShout elf) Thanks so much to all who came! Martha S.

Our preliminary list and tool kit

2008-01-29T08:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to our booklist and tool kit--let us know what you think!

Who we are

2008-01-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

Here's RingShout's founding circle:

Bridgett M. Davis's debut novel Shifting Through Neutral was published in 2004 by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, and chosen as an “Original Voices” Selection by Borders Books. She was a finalist for the 2005 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright LEGACY Award, and selected as New Author of the Year by Go on Girl! Book Club -- the largest national reading group for African-American women. Her essays, reviews and articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Chicago Tribune. Her feature film, Naked Acts, won numerous awards, and was released on DVD in 2000. A Professor of Journalism at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches Creative Writing and Journalism courses, she is the recipient of the 2006 Excellence in Education award from the New York Association of Black Journalists. She is currently working on her new novel, entitled Lagos, set in 1980’s Nigeria and based on her time in West Africa as the recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Ms. Davis lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.

Christopher Jackson is Executive Editor of Spiegel and Grau, a division of Random House. He has worked with award-winning and bestselling authors including Edwidge Danticat , Victor LaValle, David Corn, Jack Weatherford, Warren St. John, Aaron McGruder, Nancy Rawles, and Cupcake Brown

Alison Meyers is the Executive Director of Cave Canem: A Home for Black Poetry. She has more than 30 years of administrative experience with a focus on arts-and-culture development. From 2000 to 2006, she was Artistic Director of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, a multi-faceted program of Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, where she also served as Director of Marketing & Communications. Previously, she was General Manager of the Oberlin Co-operative Bookstore, a $3-million operation serving Oberlin College and the surrounding community. Prior to that, she owned and managed Everyday Books & Café in Willimantic, CT. She is also a published poet, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she has been a judge for the Connecticut Book Awards and the ImPac Awards, and served as a panelist for the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen is the author of Crystelle Mourning, a novel described by The Washington Post as “a call for healing in the African American community from generations of hurt and neglect.” Her essays, exploring topics ranging from Hip Hop to Muslim life in America post-9/11 to the gap between the Civil Rights generation and Generation X, have been widely anthologized. Nominated by Essence magazine for a National Association of Black Journalists Award, she has contributed to numerous other publications, including The Washington Post, Ms., Health, Heart & Soul, Vibe, The Source, Black Issues Book Review, Quarterly Black Review of Books, and CreativeNonfiction.org. She is the recipient of a Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center Fellowship for Young African American Fiction Writers and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Ulen graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. She teaches English at Hunter College in New York City and lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was shortlisted for the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy award. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her July 2007 New York Times Book Review article "Writers Like Me" was the initial spark for RingShout and generated considerable notice in publishing and literary circles. Previous non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere, and Essence. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

How did we come to be?

2008-01-28T08:27:00.000-08:00

RingShout was founded following Martha Southgate's essay "Writers Like Me" in the New York Times Book Review in July of 2007. The response in the blogosphere and in the literary world was enormous. So Martha wanted to harness this energy. She contacted Cornelius Eady and Alison Meyers of Cave Canem , a group she greatly admired, for insight into how they had formed their organization. The next step was contacting several writers, editors and a bookseller (Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson Books who participated in our first couple of meetings) who she knew and respected. The five got together over a period of six months and brainstormed until they had come up with a way to form a book list and a tool kit that would help carry out the group's mission. We kicked off with a party to drum up support and volunteers on February 1, 2008. At the present time, we remain an all-volunteer effort that is unaffiliated with any larger organization.

What is ringShout?

2008-01-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

Welcome to our temporary internet home. Thanks to Ann Leamon for telling us that we could use Blogger in this way until we get our site up. Watch out for updates!

Our Mission

Founded in 2007 by a group of writers, editors and booksellers,
ringShout: A Place for Black Literature
is dedicated to recognizing, reclaiming and celebrating
excellence in contemporary literary fiction and nonfiction
by black writers in the United States.

Why the name ringShout?

One of the first dances created by
Africans brought to America as slaves
in the 1700s, the ring shout was a
sacred circle dance of salvation that enabled
a community to find perserverance,
provided solace and rejuvenation,
and sheltered many early nuances of
Africanist culture and practice.

Adapted from Thea Nerissa Barnes,
The Association of Dance of the African
Diaspora Dictionary 2005-2006

We hope that our ringShout can be the same for serious, skilled black writers creating ambitious fiction. We also want to assert our centrality to all facets of the American experience, literary and otherwise.