Scarlet

I wanted to belong — but I didn’t want to dress like everyone else. Down Eastern Avenue, I passed television repair shops thick with dust; pawnshops, biker bars; a Taco Bell. In 1990s southeast Los Angeles, this is what people wore: teased bangs; discount jeans; T-shirts with kittens and phrases in puffy letters: “Someone in […]

I want to write about tierra, which means soil or earth to my people, maybe dirt, or land, which, in turn, means something very precise and precious. By writing, I tell the world I am a brown man. Where I am from. What I am. Not boxes to mark some form, but blood knowledge, what

Every year it was the same. The then Milwaukee Sentinel printed the pictures of all their summer interns who worked at the paper. The pictures were divided into two categories: Interns Minority Interns Each year, my picture, with the worst lighting imaginable, was displayed under the minority banner. I hated that term: minority intern. It

Several years ago during my first semester in graduate school, some of my classmates and I went out to a local watering hole after a rather tedious writing workshop. Which, by the way, was nothing new. I found my graduate writing workshops consistently difficult, not because I couldn’t take critique, but the focus of the

Disclaimer One: The intended audience for this talk is mainly white writers, so I use the dreaded royal ‘We’. I understand none of the We in this room are a monolith, but pronouns save time—and time is short. Disclaimer Two: While these remarks focus on race specifically, many of the same or similar points could

There has never been a consensus or even a plurality agreement among writers who identify as Black about the aesthetics of our creative work. Or, whether there is such a thing as black writing. Or what makes the African American literary canon cohere. Or what constitutes pandering to an audience. We have never agreed on

In 2014, I spoke on a panel called “Crossing (Imagined) Borders: Research, Writing, and the Challenges of the 21st Century,” at the Writing Research Across Borders annual conference in Paris. My paper concerned the ways I’d heard and seen English used while I taught in Liberia – everything from conversations with palm-wine tappers and motorcycle

When I was 10 in 1969, without permission, I went and had my hot combed hair washed and cut into a round, nappy afro. When I arrived home in the afternoon, allegedly coming from a friend’s house around the corner, my mother slapped her hand over her mouth and cried. She was horrified. I left

When I was a kid growing up in a white (and cis and straight) suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, my mom worked hard to raise us with sensitivity and intelligence around issues of race, class, physical ability, and discrimination. Not an easy task in a community like that. Even though the combined income of my parents

My ex-husband suffered bipolar disorder. We lived among the facts of his illness. Trips to the emergency room, where he sought relief from migraine pain. Nests of paper scraps littering the futon where he had fallen asleep — finally — mid-collage-making, open scissors in hand, pointing up toward his sleeping face. Frenzied letters to friends,