One class. Thirteen students. Nine books. One film. Five guest speakers. It's a wrap! Grateful for this writeup on my first graduate course @fordham.edu called "New Theories in Black Studies." Already looking forward to the next time I can teach it.

"A piece of this book [The Edge of Space-Time] is me saying there is value in banding with the poets, and fighting for the value of being curious and trying to articulate the world with whatever tools are available to us." -- @chanda.blacksky.app via @nytimes.com

Taught my first graduate course @fordham.edu called "New Theories in Black Studies." Together we read nine books published in the past two to three years. Grateful to the students who made this course possible and the guest speakers who visited with us this semester.

"The artistic and critical work emerging from the study of [Octavia] Butler’s archive astounds and continues... [Susana] Morris’s and [Chi-ming] Yang’s biographies are just two of a growing list of publications, talks, and performances emerging from the wealth of Butler’s bequest to the Huntington."

"Neither of the movements she [Kimberlé Crenshaw] named was designed for mainstream acceptance. C.R.T. was born as an insurgent project, and intersectionality was once a critique of the civil-rights movement. What are they now?" -- Kelefa Sanneh via @newyorker.com

"At the core of [Toni] Morrison’s career in letters was a listening practice... She listened so that the worlds she conjured on the page felt real." -- Danielle Amir Jackson via @theguardian.com

"For [Jamaica] Kincaid, after empires die, the consequences of their rule endure for many years." -- @jacobinoire.bsky.social via @thenation.com

"With Bounty, I wanted to see what the Arawaks, the Caribs, the Europeans, the Africans, the migrant Chinese and Indian workers would have seen within the one constant thing which would have brought attention to their gaze, a thing of beauty." -- Steve McQueen via @theguardian.com

"There is no better time to read a book of Toni Morrison’s lectures on American literature than now." -- Claudia Brodsky via @smithsonianmag.bsky.social

Had a great time presenting at the Faculty Research Roundtable in the English Department at Fordham University last night. Wonderful to share my work and learn what my colleagues are up to.

I was so pleased to welcome the current fellows from the Patrick Healy Fellowship of Georgetown University to @fordham.edu for their NYC Career Day. Check out this write up about my time in the fellowship and the current fellows recent visit to NY. #hoyasaxa www.fordhamenglish.com/news1/the-pa...

“Writing is my weapon and my sanctuary.” — Tina Campt, The Scholar & Feminist Conference, Barnard College

"In her work, she [Paule Marshall] brought the black world together under her diasporan magnifying glass..." -- Mary Helen Washington, Paule Marshall: A Writer's Life

TONIGHT! We have moved the event with Dr. Durham to Zoom as a result of the blizzard. Join us online from 6:45 pm to 8:00 pm for the New Theories in Black Studies Speaker Series! RSVP directly to me at [email protected] and I will provide the Zoom link.

"Unlike authoritative declarations of truth, fiction has no obligation to dispel ambiguity...In Beloved, [Toni] Morrison does take possession of the master’s tools, but she bends them, breaks them, and then uses them to reshape the house." -- @namwalien.bsky.social via @lithub.com.web.brid.gy

"In [Toni] Morrison’s eyes, the sacred function of the story is to find a form to hold what the mind can scarcely bear (or, as the censorship bears out, what society can scarcely admit)." -- Parul Sehgal via @nytimes.com

On February 24, 2026 from 6:45 pm to 8:00 pm, Dr. I. Augustus Durham (@imeanswhatisays.bsky.social) will visit @fordham.edu to discuss his book Stay Black and Die: On Melancholy and Genius (Duke University Press) in Freeman Hall, Tiered Lecture Hall 103. Join us! RSVP here: luma.com/hvcobbiu

"What biomythography foregrounds is the way myth is central to her [Audre Lorde's] writing of her life, her writing for her life, her writing life, her life writing." -- @seminewblack.bsky.social via @lithub.com.web.brid.gy

"[Toni] Morrison, I think, does this to people who care enough to burrow into the text: exhilarate their intellect." -- Wesley Morris via @nytimes.com

"Altogether, On Morrison homes a novelist-critic’s eye in on a novelist-critic’s body of work and not only considers the beautiful world-building that has enamored publics for decades but does so with attention steeped in the craft of Black virtuosity." -- @omweekes.bsky.social

"With all that gravitas, you might not realize it, but Toni Morrison was funny as hell." -- @namwalien.bsky.social via @nybooks.com

"Quiet as it’s kept, nobody knows what The Bluest Eye is really about. Ever since its publication, it has left many unsure about what to make of it." -- @namwalien.bsky.social via @thenation.com

Took a trip to the Yale Center for British Art over the weekend to see the exhibit “Passages” by Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke. Here are a few photos from the exhibit, which is up until January 11, 2026. Check it out!

"The new Studio Museum roots Harlem in the present, without insisting on it, and in that way it tells a different tale: Harlem has a future, and the future is now." -- Hilton Als via @newyorker.com

“Poetry is ceremony.” — Joy Harjo Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith in conversation with Krista Tippett at Symphony Space

The American Studies Association Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico was fantastic. I participated in an ”Author Meets Critics” session for @jessagoldberg.bsky.social book “Abolition Time: Grammars of Law, Poetics of Justice.“ What a gift to be in conversation with such brilliant scholars.

"[Toni] Morrison’s skill as an editor surely made her a better writer, but it undeniably took time and energy away from her own work, and it was never fully appreciated as an intellectual endeavor in itself." -- Marina Magloire via @thenation.com

I recently participated in the Toni Morrison Symposium @cornelluniversity.bsky.social as part of the “Toni Morrison and the Word Work of Her Nonfiction” panel. Sharing a few photos from the event including a mural of Toni Morrison painted by students from Ithaca High School.

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

"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...