Normally by November, independent reading would be well established in my classroom. I’d still be working with a few students to find that just right book, but most students would have finished a couple of books by now and pleasure reading–in class at least–would be part of our predictable routine. But with the upheaval of…
On the blog: A short slice about feeding the feral cats in my new neighborhood In reading: I’ll start with the best book I read this week, Angela Narciso Torres’s poetry chapbook, To the Bone, available as a free download from Sundress. These are gorgeous poems, full of insight and lush language and imagery and…
My mother thinks that I must hang a neon sign that only cats can see outside my house. Wherever I go, it takes the neighborhood cats all of ten minutes to find me. I’m afraid the sign works more like this: I see a cat from my window and I run outside to feed it.…
On the blog: It’s not to late to join The Sealey Challenge I have been having fun with my new Detroit Public Library card today! One very mild pandemic benefit: closed libraries in Michigan meant that all I had to do to get a temporary library card was type in my new address and ten…
There is little I love more than a monthlong daily challenge, and poet Nicole Sealey created a good one: read an entire collection of poetry or a poetry chapbook every day for the month of August. This is the fourth year that readers have gathered together online to share daily poems across their social media…
You’d think that in the month I’ve taken off of blogging I would have read so many books. Sadly, no. Moving slowed me down as a reader. Entire days where I didn’t so much as open a book! But I have unpacked enough book boxes now to fill a couple of shelves, and I am…
Thought-provoking piece from Eve Ewing about why she now capitalize the “w” in white (note: Black should always be capitalized). Ewing explained on Twitter that her goal in the piece isn’t to make anyone change their mind but rather to ask people to choose intentionally and meaningfully. (Zora) It’s really demoralizing to see that so…
For the past few months, ever since I read Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius and began learning from her articles and presentations, I’ve been thinking about a question she frequently centers in her work: why don’t we use a “Black and Brown model as our framework of education,” especially when we are educating Black, Indigenous…
On the blog: Six articles worth sharing I’ll be starting Dream Job #4 this fall In reading: I was listening to Stamped on audio when Covid hit and my commute time/audiobook time decreased to zero. I just managed to finish the last 60 minutes this week. Jason Reynolds’s “remix” is really an amazing achievement, and…
Here are six important reads that came across my social media feeds in the past couple of weeks. YA novelist Tiffani Jackson reflects on “this pivotal, purposeful moment” and gives advice to young Black women who are observing and protesting and wondering what next. (Cosmopolitan) Crystal Marie Fleming shares 10 Practical Steps for Building a…
My first dream job was my very first job when I was still in high school: working at a bookstore. It was a mall bookstore, small, full of flashy commercial titles, popular series, and the occasional serendipitous discovery. I still remember the day I plucked Kendall Hailey’s The Day I Became an Autodidact from the…
My reading totals are down this week, but packing was up, and since we have a move scheduled in less than three weeks, that’s probably a good thing! Katherine Bomer’s The Journey Is Everything was a reread for me and welcome prep for thinking about how to incorporate essay more organically and less formulaically in…
I haven’t read the article yet, but I appreciated the challenge in the title of an op-ed a friend shared yesterday: “When Black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs.” I think there’s something true about that. More than anything else, what I’m seeing online right now as a response to this…
On the blog: A links round-up of six good articles from the past week A request to teachers to stop assigning harmful books In reading: The whole time I was reading Rebecca Stead’s new middle-grade novel, The List of Things That Will Not Change, I kept wondering if there would be some kind of unexpected…
I learn so much from organizer and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba on Twitter. Her opinion piece for the New York Times, Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police, packs so much history, knowledge, and persuasion into a small space. (Bonus read: I also loved Eve Ewing’s interview with Kaba, Everything Worthwhile Is Done With Other…
