Giancarlo Esposito and Spike Lee in the 1988 film School Daze. (Photo: Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks)
Please check out my latest post on Black Perspectives: Representing HBCUs: Spike Lee’s School Daze at 30.
Please check out my latest piece for Poetry Foundation, “My Music is Words,” on the poetry of Sun Ra.
Starting this month, I will be a regular contributor at Black Perspectives, the blog for the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). My first post for the year is “The Story of Black Colleges and Universities,” a review of the new documentary Tell Them We Are Rising, which premiers nationally February 19 on PBS. There will be a Twitter chat on the night of the broadcast under the hashtag #HBCURising. Follow @HBCURising on Twitter for more details. And make sure to subscribe to Black Perspectives and follow AAIHS to see all the excellent public scholarship that AAIHS is producing.
Back in 2007 I reviewed Samuel R. Delany’s Dark Reflections for the GC Advocate. Dark Reflections went out of print later that year when it’s publisher, Carroll & Graf, was acquired by another company and then dissolved, which turns out to be an oddly relevant development for a novel about the precarious nature of publishing and the writing life. Thankfully, Dover Books has released an updated and revised edition of Dark Reflections in 2016. I decided to write about this new version of the novel from the perspective of race and literary awards for The New Inquiry.
if you haven’t seen it, I also recommend Matthew Cheney’s extensive review essay on Dark Reflections in LA Review of Books.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Black Flame, and the Struggle Ahead, has just been published on the African American Intellectual History Society’s newly redesigned blog, Black Perspectives. I’ll be discussing more about Du Bois and The Black Flame at the upcoming second annual AAIHS conference on March 24-25 in Nashville, TN.
THE BLACKADEMIC LIFE: THE BLOG 