My latest book, Point Blank, is 2-plus years old. If it was a person, it’d just be learning the words to express its frustration. It’d be in a high chair, throwing a tantrum. It’d be flinging food on the walls. It’d be laughing as it’s distressed parents, overwhelmed with sleeplessness, throw up their hands and […]
A writer’s true power, as Toni Morrison once put it, is his/her ability “to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar.” Tim does both in his latest collection, One Turn Around The Sun, a beautiful tribute to his parents. In this 95-page collection, Tim familiarized his parents who were strangers to this reader. In fact, […]
SHE HADN’T NOTICED HIM the first time. The bookstore clerk was typing away until a customer’s questions pulled him over to the “Politics and Culture” section. He was shorter than six feet. Anyone close enough might have noticed a thick crease across his forehead from a do-rag tied too tight. Sitting at the bar […]
(view excerpts from this graphic novella-in-progress) “During happy times, pride and extravagance are dangerous. If one is not prudent in ordinary times, he will not be able to catch up. A person who advances during good times will falter during the bad.” —Yamamoto Tsunetomo, “Hagakure” THEY RAN DOWN 31st Street NW. It was […]
This piece, which I wrote in 2006, first appeared in The Arabesque Review. Lela rises at 4a.m. to catch the W13 for 5:45 downtown. She reaches the office at 6:30 to start coffee and have a fresh pot brewed for the workers stumbling in at 7a.m. She was always known to bring in snacks and […]
Editor’s note: Several years ago, while studying Journalism at Howard University, I started to appreciate prose. Having written mostly poems up until that point, I enjoyed the freedom prose gave me that I didn’t have with poetry. Poems seemed more demanding because of the various literary devices and space. Prose opened a new world to […]
EDITOR’S NOTE: I wrote this article for Generations United‘s Together Blog. It appears here with the organization’s permission. Barbara Wells knows a thing or two about adversity – how it can either break you or tap unexpected strengths. As someone who succeeds at challenges, the biggest one came for the single grandmother in 2006, when her […]
We experimented with a video version of this post. Watch it here. Editor’s note: This profile is part three of an on-going series on successful bloggers and their process. Read part one here and click here for part two. Edward “Ned” James Hickson doesn’t believe in “road blocks.” Instead, the editor and humor columnist sees […]
There are no pews in this darkened sanctuary. Atop the booming pulpit, a DJ spins a sampled sermon for the head-nodding congregation, colored in sweeping orange and yellow spotlights, the few among them kicking MF Doom lyrics the way a disciplined believer spits scripture. The revival on the second floor is fitting for hiphop’s holy […]
Scrolling through the notes on his smart phone, Gregg Deal, a visual artist and self-professed vandal, asked his digital media cohorts an important question last night. “How would you react if” — while grocery shopping — “you came around the corner to see this?” He pointed at a slide photo of himself sporting a decorative […]
Alan W. King 