[By: Ebony Perro] Angie Thomas’ novel turned screenplay, The Hate U Give (THUG), is a tragically mimetic story that highlights a Black girl’s coming of age while navigating trauma-induced anger and growing up in two disparate communities. As a New York Times Best Seller, National Book Award Long List winner, and with a current box office total of over 18 million dollars, the novel’s success […]

[By: Jerry W. Ward, Jr.] Monday, October 22, 2018, was a special day in the year-long celebration of three hundred years of history in New Orleans, because we had the privilege of seeing a remarkable instance of black film in the history of cinema in the United States of America. We saw Horace Jenkins’s Cane River (1982), a major feature of the 29th New Orleans […]

Sunday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Toni Morrison, the first black woman to receive the prestigious award. Although the honor wasn’t necessary to validate the importance of Morrison’s thought-provoking vision and moving stories that have altered the way we traditionally understand what fiction does,  her acceptance speech  gives just a 30-minute glimpse into the depths of […]

[By: Anthony Boynton] Noname’s sophomore album Room 25 is hypnotic and alluring. Indeed a coming of age story, this self-released project is a meditation of what the Los Angeles-based Chicago rapper calls her “darkest secrets”, and you should hear her out, like the track “Ace” (feat. Smino and Saba) says. Brilliantly mixing rap, jazz, and neo-soul, Noname crafts a solid album that is not only […]