Tag: #sol20
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Paco Seamus Sasha Mojo Lincoln Sweet Potato: Slice of Life #sol20
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.…
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The Sealey Challenge: Read A Book of Poetry Every Day in August #sol20
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…
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Spending the Morning with Dr. Anna Julia Cooper #sol20
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…
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Dream Job #4: Slice of Life #sol20
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…
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Taking Action in Our Sphere of Influence #sol20
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…
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Celebrating the Pulitzer Prizes: Slice of Life #sol20
I started my day with the news, and today was yet another day when the world–when Americans–were too much for me. What has sustained me through the last twenty-four hours is reading and rereading these enlightening paragraphs from Dr. Ibram Kendi’s latest piece in The Atlantic: Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual…
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Stray Cat: Slice of Life #sol20
A stray cat has taken up residence in our garage. This isn’t an unexpected occurrence: our neighborhood has a fair number of strays and ferals, and to help them through winter, we have a feral cat winter shelter station set up in the garage. And it probably surprises exactly none of my regular blog readers…
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Some Thoughts on the Process of Writing Poetry: Slice of Life #sol20
I have been trying to observe my process this month to figure out how poetry happens, but I have to confess that I’m as much in the dark as I ever was—despite having written a poem every day this month. One thing I know about myself as a writer is that I like some constraint.…
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How to Love eBooks: Slice of Life 19/31 #sol20
Yes, I can use the Kindle to read a literary novel, or a business bestseller, or a sci-fi thriller, but they all come out tasting like Kindle. Alexandra Samuel, 7 Ways You Can Learn to Love Reading eBooks I wish I could learn to love reading on a device. The convenience–and the pricing–is so tempting.…
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Some Thoughts on Antiracist Teaching: Slice of Life 5/31 #sol20
My reading life is all Dr. Kendi all the time right now. My mother and I are doing a slow read of How to Be an Antiracist for our mother-daughter book club of two. On my commute to work, I’m listening to the audiobook of Jason Reynolds’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, a brilliant adaptation…
the dirigible plum 