What Makes a Book “Appropriate” for School?
This is why I was stunned when I learned that a school district in Leander, Texas, had elected to remove my award-winning memoir, Ordinary Hazards, from their curriculum.
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 […]
The Poetry Pool
I love a good laugh. I laugh every day. I even make a point of giving others cause to chuckle, even if it’s sometimes at my own expense. Laughter is cleansing, healing, and necessary. God himself has a phenomenal sense of humor. He made us, didn’t he? Yes, laughter is to be appreciated, enjoyed. That […]
The Problem with Poetry
For the record, just because a particular notion is repeated, over and over again, doesn’t necessarily make it true. The earth is not flat, nor is it the center of the universe. People of African descent are not intellectually inferior to the white race. And contrary to what you may have heard, over the years, […]