August 23, 2019
It Will Be Empowering: An Interview with David Mura, Author of A Stranger’s Journey; Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing
This post is the eighth in a months-long series that explores the topic of craft: what it is, how it has evolved, who has historically had access to it, and […]
April 21, 2019
Jordan Peele’s Us Exposes America’s Shadow Self
This is the first in my new series, American Gothic: Investigating Horror, Ghosts, Monsters, & Haunted Houses. Stay tuned for more… After Jordan Peele’s movie Us introduces the Wilson family […]
December 27, 2018
Gentrification, the American Lie: An Interview with Stacie Williams
I met Stacie Williams a few years ago in a writing workshop I taught in Cleveland. She submitted a short story that was set in a gentrifying neighborhood, and I […]
February 21, 2018
Commodities, Bodies, and Budgets
The Trump administration budget request for fiscal year 2019 made the news this week due to many of the changes proposed. There are now tons of articles discussing the drastically […]
January 27, 2018
American Sonnets (Part XII: Precursors)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part XI: Insistence)”] Terrance Hayes ended a 2006 post for Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, by writing that “it is possible to value two very different things at […]
January 17, 2018
An Interview with Naima Coster
Naima Coster’s debut novel, Halsey Street, examines critical issues such as gender, gentrification, anger, and art making. Recently Coster wrote a thoughtful, important essay on the significance of having a […]
September 15, 2017
Reading Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark After Charlottesville
As someone who teaches literature post-Charlottesville (and everything else), I felt it was an important time to revisit Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination […]
August 23, 2017
Charlottesville Fabulous
My big brother lives in Charlottesville. We grew up together in Groveport, Ohio, rode the bus with a girl whose dad was a Columbus cop, whose grandfather was a World […]
August 4, 2017
The How to Get Your Students to Love Poetry and Sociopolitical Issues Lesson Plan
Just as I can’t ride the subway without finding iambic pentameter and social commentary in even a foot pain ad, poetry and sociopolitical issues have made their often awkward, yet […]
July 4, 2017
Some Thoughts on Independence Day
Lately, for reasons I can’t really name, I’ve been reading about the Enlightenment in an old textbook that’s been lying around for years. It brings back the excitement of college […]
May 29, 2017
On Race and Recent Events
Some guys on the football team took one of their teammates—I’ll say his name was Ned—out to the field, got some medical tape out of the locker room, and […]
May 10, 2017
On Why Poem Titles Matter (Part 1 of 2)
I. Names Poems are not people. They resist qualitative judgments based on their actions or potential—it doesn’t matter that a poem is musical. So is music. Perhaps this is why […]