In August 2020, members of the Richard Wright family wrote statements regarding the social unrest our country has faced and shared them in the “Richard Wright News Bulletin.” In honor of Richard Wright’s 112th birthday on September 4, 2020, HBW begins a three-part series as an inter-generational family tribute to Wright’s legacy. Part II I am grateful to George Floyd for reminding me of an […]
In August 2020, members of the Richard Wright family wrote statements regarding the social unrest our country has faced and shared them in the “Richard Wright News Bulletin.” In honor of Richard Wright’s 112th birthday on September 4, 2020, HBW begins a three-part series as an inter-generational family tribute to Wright’s legacy. Part I A world ago, before COVID-19, before Ahmaud Arbery, before Breonna Taylor, […]
[By: Shayna S. Israel] The Furious Flower Poetry Center has held biennial summer legacy seminars since 2009 (with a hiatus in 2013 and 2015), a focused opportunity to study the work of a living poet. Beginning with Lucille Clifton, seminars have been held on Sonia Sanchez (2011) and Yusef Komunyakaa (2017). As the nation’s only center devoted to Black poetry, Furious Flower’s choice of […]
[By: Jerry W. Ward Jr.] Alexander, Stephon. The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link between Music and the Structure of the Universe. New York: Basic Books, 2016. In her 2007 poem “In Search of Grace,” Quo Vadis Gex Breaux makes an elegant plea for an enabling virtue. Those lines which trigger my imagination are I pray for grace, as I dance on life’s tabletops, as I scale the […]
[By: Anthony Boynton, III] As the tension of the 2015 Charleston church shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal thickened the air, Bree Newsome climbed into the sky to tear down hatred’s flag. Social media and mainstream media outlets were abuzz over the activist’s act of civil disobedience and subsequent arrest. Since then, Newsome has gained national attention and has been touring the country giving talks […]
[By: Jerry W. Ward, Jr.] Hype matters. In his foreword for Joan Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), Nicholas Rich asserts that Didion’s prose has “cool majesty” as well as “an immaculacy as intimidating as Chelsea porcelain” (xi). The assertion and the subject of the assertion invite scrutiny. Truth be told, the sentence “Everyone in the place seemed to have […]
A digital poem from HBW Alum Dr. DaMaris Hill: Shut Up In My Bones: a digital poem – a remix from D Hill on Vimeo. “I recently completed a poetry manuscript entitled A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing. Many of the poems detail the violent consequences black women endure while engaged in individual and collective acts of protest and resistance. My grandmother’s picture and a […]