August 28, 2015
A Postcard from–
My Johns Hopkins colleague Hollis Robbins (director of the JHU Center for Africana Studies and chair of the humanities department at the Peabody Institute) recently wrote an article for The Chronicle of […]
June 30, 2015
Teach This (Part IV)
[Continued from yesterday’s post on teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner.”] It might seem strange to teach the same poem twice in a single semester (particularly two weeks […]
June 29, 2015
Teach This (Part III)
Building off of my posts from June 17 and June 18, today I’m thinking about why I love teaching Robert Hayden’s “The Ballad of Nat Turner” and “Night, Death, Mississippi” so much. For […]
June 18, 2015
Teach This (Part II)
Yesterday afternoon, I hit “Publish” on a blog post reflecting on widely anthologized and widely taught poems. My intention was not to criticize those poems (there are many good reasons […]
January 8, 2015
A Physiology of Style: Asthma, Proust, Pharoahe Monch
“This asthma became part of his art—if indeed his art did not create it. Proust’s syntax rhythmically and stop by step reproduces his fear of suffocating. And his ironic, philosophical, […]
December 10, 2014
Earl Sweatshirt’s Bookshelf, and Time
Bookshelves do funny things to time. In a recent clip, rapper Earl Sweatshirt lets FADER TV tour his Hollywood bachelor pad. In a Cribs send-up, he guides the camera through […]
November 28, 2013
Happy Birthday to “Midnight”
A few weeks ago, an important literary event went unnoticed in the literary world: Midnight Marauders turned twenty. Midnight, the third album of legendary hip hop group A Tribe Called […]
December 18, 2010
Expanding My Bookshelf
Last week, I wrote that there are no easy answers or solutions to the problem of the underrepresentation of writers of color in the publishing industry. As small step towards […]