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 […]
April 3, 2016
Killing the Butterfly: Facing Failure on the Page
Ann Patchett has this wonderful analogy that compares the writing process to murdering a butterfly. I heard her share this in person years ago at one of her events, and […]
March 16, 2016
More Light, More Light
For a while, I’ve been meaning to review Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. It is a book for our times, and, better, a masterful writerly performance. But I […]
February 18, 2016
Reagan on the Couch, Part 1
In the late summer of 1976, from the tan shag carpet of our living room in the Taco Flats neighborhood of Cupertino, California, I watched on TV with my brother, […]
September 30, 2015
One Book at a Time
I’m not sure what felt better, successfully defending my dissertation, or returning 120 books to the library and being able to see the floor of my office again. My bookcases […]
August 14, 2015
Mix tape: Marquez’s remains, a letter from Ferrante, and the John Green book generator
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s remains have been returned to Cartagena, Colombia. This city is not just the author’s birthplace, but also the setting of Love in a Time of Cholera. His […]
April 30, 2015
Facing It
Today, though I stumble, as usual, I am “thinking through” my language–considering my word choices in a draft of a poem, in comments on student work, in conversations with other attendees on the steps […]
April 28, 2015
everywhere/everywhere/everywhere
I am in Baltimore and I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say because I am trying to listen. I am trying to listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates: Now, […]