Had a chance to talk about why I like teaching A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand. There has yet to be a class @fordham.edu where I haven't had this book on the syllabus. Great to see what my colleagues are teaching, too!

"A former documentary photographer, [Lorna] Simpson harnessed the medium in her early practice to develop a body of work that explores how meaning is assigned to the body and its images." -- Rachel Hunter Himes via @thenation.com

“I am so busy. So caught up with living.” At the Full and Change of the Moon, Dionne Brand

Thank you @sashapanaram.bsky.social for your review of *The Sisterhood.* I feel lucky to be in scholarly conversation with your work. scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/rals/ar... @columbiaup.bsky.social

"She [Octavia E. Butler] wanted freedom and independence—not the responsibility of babies or a husband. She made writing her rebellion, the main refuge from the strictness of her upbringing." -- Susana M. Morris via Literary Hub

"The vague impression that Bronxites burned down their own borough endures, while the vast fortunes made were forgotten." -- @benchansfield.bsky.social via @newyorker.com

"You see me in the garden walking around just plundering around thinking of a sentence. Sometimes it takes me a week to finish a sentence just to get it right." -- Jamaica Kincaid via @nytimes.com

"One might say that her [Jamaica Kincaid] work is self-consciously modest, that her fiction never grandstands. It gets to the marrow of how motherhood, childhood, and femininity are dented by colonialism, certainly, but it does so by illuminating the struggle simply to become a human being."

"Amy Sherald has withdrawn her upcoming solo show from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because she said she had been told the museum was considering removing her painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid provoking President Trump."

"To sustain poetry in the absence of its radical muse—left collective political action—to sustain poetry when there is no inspiration, that was my work." -- Dionne Brand via @jewishcurrents.bsky.social

Had to grab the Canadian version of Dionne Brand’s Salvage while in town. Love the cover!

Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum

Caught a few incredible documentaries at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in June. First time attending and already can’t wait for next year.

"With great respect and meticulous research, @danaawilliamsink.bsky.social reveals [Toni] Morrison as a hard worker, a devoted literary citizen and one of the most important book editors of the 20th century." -- Martha Southgate via @nytimes.com

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“If you center Black women in your political work and cultural work, then you’re cooking with gas.” — dream hampton @fordfoundation.org

This piece, “Ghost Note,” from the Lorna Simpson: Source Notes exhibit at @metmuseum.org continues to haunt me.

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes @metmuseum.org

Reviewed Oneka LaBennett's latest book Global Guyana for @sxsalon.bsky.social. As I write in the review, "LaBennett reminds readers that we cannot tell the history of Guyana without careful attention to its women and girls." Check it out and go get the book! smallaxe.net/sxsalon/revi...

Announcing the launch of sx salon 48. The issue includes essays by Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Stéphane Martelly, reviews by Sasha Ann Panaram, Oriana Méjías Martinez, Maddi Chan and Linzey Corridon, poems by Letitia Marie Pratt, and stories by José Darío Martínez Milantchi and Alicia Valasse-Polius.

"[Lorna] Simpson is contemporary art's astronomer of the archives, always searching for the dark matter that 'documentary' images conceal." -- @jcljules.bsky.social via @newyorker.com

“Why not imagine a new radical set of arrangements? Why not imagine more than what seems reasonable?” — Saidiya Hartman @fordham.edu

"We are overjoyed that Preston will remain open for young women in the Bronx. It’s beyond a school. It’s about the future of the Bronx, New York and even the country, because these are our future leaders." -- Jackeline Stewart-Hawkins via @nytimes.com

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! #prestonforever

"The task of the writer, of a writer like me, whether of fiction or non-fiction, or of casual or bureaucratic texts, is to narrate our own consciousnesses, to retrieve a life in the register of the social and the political..." -- Dionne Brand, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

!!!

Tonight Attorney General Letitia James will hold a public hearing from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at Lehman High School Auditorium regarding the proposed closure of Preston High School. I’m sharing the livestream link. I’ll be speaking in front of the attorney general as part of the alumnae panel.

"[Audre] Lorde transformed that grief and that fear and the nightmares she had throughout her life into an imperative in her work. The technology of her poetry lets us understand our power and our responsibility even when we’re feeling powerless..." -- @alexispauline.bsky.social

Thanks so much for reading and sharing this article, Caleb! We've got so much more to learn from Lorde and Andaiye.

"Unlike poets who work with music to experiment with the presentation of their written work, [Fred] Moten seems to be committing himself to music as a way of removing the page and placing words into air as an intellectual confrontation." -- Nate Wooley via @thenation.com

"One is born into narrative and into its structures... The question is how to disentangle oneself from those dominant forms. Therefore, how, in a sense, to write about the rest of the world. What shape might that take?" -- Dionne Brand via Brick, A Literary Journal

TONIGHT! Looking forward to this event with choreographer, dancer, artist, and activist nia love on Monday, March 10 at 6:30 pm at 15 Seminary Pl. Room 4225 at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Register for your free seat: go.rutgers.edu/Nia-Love

"Five and a half years after [Toni] Morrison’s death, it’s apparent that, while Dreaming Emmett continues to be little known even among ardent fans of her work, the play is not merely a biographical curio." -- Elon Green via @vulture.com

Looking forward to this event with choreographer, dancer, artist, and activist nia love on Monday, March 10 at 6:30 pm at 15 Seminary Pl. Room 4225 at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Register for your free seat: go.rutgers.edu/Nia-Love

Great event the NYPL last night with @imaniperry.bsky.social and @allofitwnyc.bsky.social about ‘Black in Blues.’ Loved the performance by Bilal and esperanza spalding. Still thinking about this particular thing Dr. Perry said: “I wanted to write a book that wasn’t an argument but a journey.”

"We are increasingly an illiterate society, which is why we are increasingly an anti-democratic one... I think that in the current moment one of the greatest things we can do is to instill a love of reading in our young people." -- Farah Jasmine Griffin via @truthout.org

"Given how much is known about slave ships, it’s fair to ask if excavating them will fundamentally alter conceptions of the Middle Passage." -- Julian Lucas via @newyorker.com

"But for me, part of the joy of being alive is trying to make all the parts of the self cohere, rules or no rules." -- Hilton Als via @nytimes.com

"People are not incorrect about Octavia Butler predicting the future, but they’re not always clear about what kind of future she was envisioning." -- Hanif Abdurraqib via @newyorker.com

“I see the world as a magical place." -- Nnedi Okorafor via @nytimes.com

Sandra Guzmán: "What is the closest thing you do that feels like a prayer?" Jamaica Kincaid: "Plant something. It’s the most spiritual feeling, closeness to something divine and worthy, when I am planting something."

This year, especially the last half, was filled with a lot of good literature, poetry, and music. Dionne Brand. Edwidge Danticat. Saidiya Hartman. m. nourbeSe philip. Safiya Sinclair. Kevin Jared Hosein. Hanif Abdurraqib. JJJJJerome Ellis. James McBride. Let’s see what 2025 has in store!

"She [Nikki Giovanni] was a contrarian yet utterly original, warm yet suffered no fools, wrote children’s books but could curse up a storm—some might say she fit her zodiac sign, which supplied the title for her memoir, Gemini." -- Kevin Young via @newyorker.com

"Among many honors, she [Nikki Giovanni] received seven N.A.A.C.P. awards and 31 honorary doctorates. And a scientist who was a fan, Robert James Baker, named a species of bat after her, the Micronycteris giovanniae."

Read this years ago and loved it: "Another example of Giovanni’s unique nature was when she was asked to keep the minutes at an executive committee meeting for the English department. Rather than note the meeting’s main points, Giovanni documented what kind and color socks people were wearing."

A favorite book of mine by Nikki Giovanni published in her later years. I once had this book faced out on my bookcase in my office. Will never forget when a student came for office hours and asked “who is that radiant woman?” Radiant indeed. May she rest in peace.

"So the question for a writer like me is always, 'What am I writing into? What am I writing over?' Every aspect of writing and of narrative fiction is concerned with it." -- Dionne Brand via @thenation.com

Really appreciated hearing JJJJJerome Ellis read from and describe the process of writing his latest collection of poetry Aster of Ceremony at the Zimmerli Art Museum. Loved learning about how m. nourbeSe philip influenced his writing.

Started the week on Monday by attending a screening of "A Place of Rage," which was shown as part of "I Guess It Was My Destiny To Live So Long" curated by Hanif Abdurraqib at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Monday seems like a lifetime ago. Glad to have started the week with June Jordan's poetry.