Have you ever been in a conversation with other people where words and ideas flowed easily among you, insight triggering insight? This was the case with Faith Adiele, Elmaz Abinader, and me at our public event at the Bay Area Book Festival on Saturday. An...
Seven years old on a sun-bright June day, she stands by the curio shop’s postcard rack. In their move across the country, her family has visited many national parks — Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon — and at every stop, she runs first...
Following the ceremony welcoming the Hōkūleʻa and its crew from Hawai'i to Piscataway tribal homeland, I thought of ironies of history. The event took place on Piscataway tribal homeland in Piscataway Park. There the National Park Service works in partnership with the Accokeek Foundation, which...
May 3rd: The Three Circles Center (an international network for multicultural environmental education), with Running Grass and Barbara Elizabeth Bolles, hosted an incredible day in Portland of meeting and being in dialogue with environmental justice, social justice, and environmental education leaders from the EPA, the...
We entered Grand Canyon National Park before sunrise, turning west onto the primitive road toward Point Sublime. This was in those ancient days when a Coupe de Ville could negotiate the unpaved miles with just a few dents and scrapes. My father had driven through the...
Perhaps you’ve seen the image, too? It’s a watercolor of a man—a white man—standing on a tree stump with a long stick, smoking, one leg crossed over the other, as he watches two women of African ancestry wield hoes on land that they are clearing...
I give deep thanks to Christina Bevilacqua who planned and hosted my visit to The Providence Athenaeum on Friday evening (3/11). What a treat it was for me to present Trace: Memory, History, Race, & the American Landscape at the Athenaeum's Salon. The Salon began in...
Yesterday I attended a truly wonderful and thought-provoking book launch and panel at UMass re: Manisha Sinha's new THE SLAVE'S CAUSE: A HISTORY OF ABOLITION. Her encyclopedic volume presents the African American role in defining and shaping the abolition movement(s) in this land from the...
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture held the first Black Life Matters Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on February 7th, with volunteers contributing to articles on Wikipedia for the national Black WikiHistory Month outreach campaign. At a dear friend's suggestion they included my great grandfather, Edward Augustine...
Sixty-six agents declined to represent Trace. Several of them had expressed initial interest based on the query letter. But all said no, some of them taking the time to explain that they would have difficulty placing my work with a mainstream publisher. The fear was...