Banned Books: Message Rewind
I share this story because it’s at the heart of the problem with current messaging about banned books.
Lessons from Charleston
An unarmed black person dies at the hands of, or in the custody of, white policemen, and we run around as if our hair were on fire, screaming, “What can we do? What can we do?” Nine black souls are massacred in a house of worship, in a state where the Confederate flag, symbol of hatred, […]
Mister Cellophane
I recently read a blog post by author René Saldaña, Jr., that got me wondering—and not for the first time—how much effort teachers and librarians, especially, go to when searching for books by authors of color. It is a question worth asking. The other day, out of curiosity, I Googled myself. I found a whopping […]
Everything Old is New Again
In preparation for a lecture I was giving on the use of poetic elements to enhance prose, I dug through a few old newspaper and magazine articles I’d written for sample passages in which I had done precisely that. In the midst of my search, I came across a piece of reportage from 1977 that […]