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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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.…
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 