I have a new piece out in the “Big Apple” issue of The Revelator, edited by Eric Schaller and Matthew Cheney. “A Walk Through Teju Cole’s Open City” was inspired by teaching Open City and taking my students on a walking tour of Lower Manhattan.
In my latest post for Black Perspectives I wrote about teaching Paule Marshall’s short story “Brooklyn” and how the story anticipates current conversations on sexual harassment and abuse. Special thanks go out to my City Tech students for reading, thinking through, and writing about this story in our classes last semester. “Paule Marshall’s “Brooklyn” and the #MeToo Movement.”
I have a new post up on the Modernism/modernity blog “The Discipline” (edited by Laura Heffernan). “Samuel R. Delany’s Atlantis: Model 1924 and the Origins of Blackness.”
I have a new piece in The New Inquiry on Jay-Z’s 4:44 and Percival Everett’s So Much Blue. One of the things I like about writing for The New Inquiry is that they are open to this kind of experimental criticism. Check it out: “Some Blues But Not The Kind That’s Blue.”
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.
