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...
For author Louise Erdrich the painted islands west of Lake Superior in Lake of the Woods are book-islands to be read. Her grandfather was the last person in her family to speak Anishinaabemowin with any fluency. So she tried to acquire what she had not...
Many rivers become one in Oklahoma. The Cimarron, forks of the Canadian, and Salt Fork vein eastward across the state to join the Arkansas River upstream of where it meanders between Ouachita and Ozark uplands. I drove in from New Mexico with an...
"Sometimes a book finds me. I know you have your own tales to tell, but occasionally I like to share the path by which a particularly fine work made its way into my hands and, subsequently, my life. This story begins in October during the...
The journeys that once-living organisms embark on toward the fossil record, few rarely complete. Decay or disintegration destroys more remains than not. And rocks exposed at Earth’s surface don’t chronicle all of the planet’s past. Tectonic upheavals, such as the forces that made the Rocky...
In traveling to the west coast for three back-to-back readings in Seattle, WA, then Point Reyes then Oakland, CA, I also realized that I had come home. Rick Simonson of the Elliott Bay Book Company and Stacie Ford-Bonnelle of the Northwest African American Museum graciously...
The first out-of-town launch reading from my new book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape took place on November 16th at Busboys & Poets in Washington, DC, in the "flagship" location on 14th and V Streets, NW. What an uplifting and inspiring evening for...
How is the past remembered and told? Who owns memory? Upland South Carolina that June was a thick ripening green, grown from red-rust soil on the ancient metamorphic Piedmont. Two questions caught between my breath and humid air as I walked the path from the...