Naomi Long Madgett, Detroit Poet Laureate and founder of the Detroit-based Lotus Press, was born into the Harlem Renaissance in 1923, the same year that Jean Toomer’s genre-defying novel Cane was published. Her first book of poetry Songs to a Phantom Nightingale appeared in 1941, when she was just seventeen years old. Madgett found mentors in both Countee Cullen and Langston […]
[By Jerry Ward Jr.] When a writer uses the findings of the social sciences regarding anger to produce an explanatory narrative, the writer’s good intentions may provoke anger and a vision of despair. How many readers find comfort when the reflection of their faces in a Mirror of Truth stares at them with contempt? Charles Duhigg, an accomplished writer of a certain kind, […]
M. B. M. [By: Ellee Rogers] In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented the inhumane, heartbreaking “zero tolerance” policy for people crossing the border into the United States. Within the next five weeks after this taking place, 2,300 children have been torn away from their loved ones, proving the dismal truth that the America we are now molding isn’t “America first,” as Trump preaches, […]