“America is indelibly black-ish,” sociologist Orlando Patterson asserted to the audience at Playhouse Square during this year’s awards ceremony. “Trying to imagine America without blacks is like trying to imagine Lake Erie with no oxygen.”
Patterson continued his thesis on race and culture as he accepted the 2016 Lifetime Achievement award from his friend and colleague Steven Pinker. Jurors selected Patterson for his global scholarship over the past 30 years, with his 2015 book, The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, earning sharp praise.
Earlier that morning, we caught up with Patterson in a few quiet moments to get his thoughts on what winning an Anisfield-Wolf award meant to him. Take a listen:
Cleveland welcomed poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips to town by giving him a good sense of our hometown pride. Visiting only months after the city won its first championship in 52 years, Phillips arrived in a walking boot, as he was recovering from surgery on his Achilles. As he made small talk, he’d remark, “Better me than Lebron, right?” To his surprise, everyone responded: “Yes, definitely. Better you than Lebron.”
Phillips told this story from the stage at Playhouse Square, where he was collecting the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf award for Heaven. We found a few quiet moments to speak with Phillips during his busy Cleveland itinerary about what this award means to him both personally and professionally:
Brian Seibert, the New York Times dance critic and 2016 nonfiction winner for his book, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, is an accomplished tap dancer himself. At the close of his book reading, the final event of Cleveland Book Week, he slipped on his tap shoes and treated the audience to a powerful dance duet with Chandler Browne, an Oberlin College student. (Missed it? Catch it here.)
A day prior, we sat down with Brian Seibert for a brief interview on what winning the 2016 award for nonfiction means to him. Take a listen:
From the Playhouse Square stage, Lillian Faderman began her acceptance of this year’s nonfiction award with a story of how she discovered she won. After Faderman received an email from jury chair Henry Louis Gates requesting her phone number, her wife Phyllis Irwin remarked that he must be soliciting support for the Hilary Clinton campaign.
Neither considered that he would be reaching out to tell her she had won this year’s Anisfield-Wolf prize for The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. The skepticism was appropriate, Faderman remarked: “In the past, writers of LGBTQ history have seldom been recognized outside of our community as worthy of awards. So I’m doubly grateful to the AW jury for believing the time has come to regard LGBTQ history as part of American history.”
As is our tradition, we interview each of our winners prior to the busyness of the evening to get their quiet thoughts on what being recognized means to them. Here is Faderman’s reflection on what the award means to her:
Last week we celebrated the inaugural Cleveland Book Week (CBW), a series of special events to celebrate Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners past and present, and showcase people and organizations working to promote literature and literacy in Greater Cleveland. Throughout the week, in coordination with a number of community partners, we hosted an array of events to engage audiences of all sizes and interests. See what CBW was all about in this visual recap:
The Cleveland Flea goes literary
We kicked off the week with a special CBW Edition of the Cleveland Flea. In the CBW tent, local writers – including David Giffels, Eva Barrett, Dave Lucas, Ali McClain, Michael Clune, Aubrey Hirsch and RA Washington – read their work from the author’s stage. Nearby, local independent booksellers Appletree Books, Guide to Kulchur, Mac’s Backs and Loganberry Books set up shop.
Swapping books in Public Square
A free book swap on Cleveland’s Public Square drew an all-ages crowd for an afternoon of free books, ice cream, chalk art and live performances. Literary and literacy-focused nonprofit organizations shared information with attendees, and local libraries offered registration for new library cards. The afternoon was truly one for the books!
Celebrating this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award-winning authors
Throughout the week, each of this year’s Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winners was honored at their own event in the community. From a poetry reading in a planetarium, to a tap dance performances alongside local dancers, these author events gave Greater Clevelanders an opportunity to connect with this year’s Ansifield-Wolf Book Award winners through intimate and engaging programs.
A star-studded evening
The centerpiece of Cleveland Book Week 2016 was the 81st Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards Ceremony. A sold-out crowd gathered at the Ohio Theatre in Playhouse Square to celebrate this year’s winners. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who herself was feted at a CBW event the night before, hosted the ceremony.
There is a quote on the back of each menu at EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute: “At Edwins, we believe in second chances.” Its founder Brandon Chrostowski, himself the recipient of a “second chance,” used his to help to change the face of prison re-entry in Cleveland.
The institute provides culinary training for incarcerated individuals – current and former. The idea is to lower obstacles that hinder their transition back into society. Classic French culinary techniques and basic managerial skills are served up in a six-month program at EDWINS Restaurant at Shaker Square in Cleveland and a nine-month program inside Grafton Correctional Institution.
The institute is the recipient of the 2016 Anisfield-Wolf Memorial Award, $25,000 given each fall to a nonprofit community organization for outstanding service. The prize is administered by the Center for Community Solutions.
“EDWINS is providing an effective solution to a critical community issue by helping people before and after their release from prison to learn skills that can be used in their specific field — the hospitality industry — or transferred to other fields,” said John R. Corlett, president and executive director of The Center for Community Solutions. “And they are doing more by providing services to help them overcome obstacles that have a unique twist for those re-entering society after incarceration and for their families — such as access to basic health care, legal aid, literacy programs, transportation, and employment.”
The initiative has garnered stellar results in its first three years. The program boasts a 0% recidivism rate, and of its 127 graduates, 97 percent have found a job within 30 days of completing the program.
Now 36, Chrostowski remembers standing in front of a judge as a teen, rocked by the possibility of spending 10 years in prison. Instead the judge gave him one year probation. Chrostowski embraced this chance and found a chef who mentored him.
Now himself an accomplished chef, sommelier and a fromager, Chrostowski spent years working at fine dining establishments in New York and Paris before launching EDWINS in Ohio. For him, it’s important not to relegate the formerly incarcerated to the back of the house. “They are sous-chefs, cheese experts and maître-d’s,” he explained in 2014.
The name EDWINS comes from Chrostowski’s grandfather, a man his grandson said embodies the culture he works to cultivate at his restaurant. It’s also a shortened form of “Education Wins,” a philosophy that echoes through the kitchen and dining rooms of this unique nonprofit concern.
“No one forgets the taste of winning,” the founder told CNN. “It’s not on our tongue, but it’s in our soul, and it’s contagious. So if you can overcome a hard challenge here at EDWINS, it’s a win. It gives you confidence. That’s our secret ingredient.”
Welcome to the inaugural Cleveland Book Week, September 10-16, designed to make our region a literary destination. At the center is the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards ceremony, with innovative new elements on the new Public Square, and programs from Lakewood and South Euclid-Lyndhurst.
Cleveland Flea is taking on a literary tone September 10 and Public Square will be awash in books —and ice cream—September 12. People can bring a book, swap a book and find a free book that day, as well as hear performances by the Distinguished Gentlemen of Spoken Word and the Cleveland Association of Black Storytellers. The first 500 guests who present their library card will receive free ice cream. (No library card? No problem. Staffs of the Cleveland Public Library and the Cuyahoga County Public Library will register new patrons.)
Then the county library foundation will host novelist Don DeLillo on September 13 at Case Western Reserve University as part of the Writers Center Stage series. Librarian Bill Kelly will interview DeLillo.
Next up, Anisfield-Wolf juror and former poet laureate Rita Dove will return home for a special Wednesday evening celebrating the publication of her new book, “Collected Poems” and the 30th anniversary of her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, “Thomas & Beulah.”
If you missed reserving your tickets to the annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Award ceremony, know can still meet our 2016 winners at the smaller, more intimate events tied closely to the themes in their award-winning books.
“We hope more people will find more ways to engage with the books, and the broader mission of equity, reading and literacy,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the awards. “Cleveland is full of world-class readers, and deserves a literary scene to match. This year, our city has been a destination for basketball fans and politicos – why not bibliophiles? We hope to add more partners next year.”
These festivities are brought to you in collaboration with Brews + Prose, Cleveland Flea, the City Club of Cleveland, and the Cuyahoga County Public Library.
Saturday, September 10
Cleveland Flea
3615 Superior Avenue
9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Look for our pop-up bookshop and literary café, where you can sample coffee and cocktails while browsing rare books and first editions or mingling with some of Cleveland’s authors.
Public Square Book Swap
Downtown Cleveland
2:30-7 p.m.
Bring a book or buy one there, then mingle with other readers and swap books! Hear from local writers and poets on the speaker’s steps and peruse your new book while enjoying live music, food and drinks on the Square.
Don DeLillo, Writers Center Stage
Maltz Performing Arts Center
Case Western Reserve University
7:30 p.m.
Don DeLillo’s novels include White Noise, for which he won the 1985 National Book Award; Libra; Mao II; Underworld and Zero K. The critic Harold Bloom named DeLillo one of four living American literary giants.
Henry Louis Gates and Toi Derricote will be on hand to honor their friend and former poet laureate, Rita Dove. The Akron native will be celebrating more than three decades of poetry in front of an audience of hometown friends and family.
Our awards ceremony is currently sold out, but we encourage you to catch the livestream right here at www.anisfield-wolf.org, beginning at 6 p.m.
Friday, September 16
Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle
“A Very Long and (Almost) Victorious Battle: The Struggle for Gay Civil Rights”
The City Club of Cleveland
12:00 p.m.
The historian will chronicle the path to social, political and economic freedom for the LGBTQ community at this City Club forum. Get tickets
Do you remember being fifteen? Let Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson’s first adult novel in 20 years, jog your memory. In this gritty, coming-of-age tale, Woodson transports readers to sweltering 1970s Brooklyn, New York, as a young girl grapples with unbearable grief, friendship and lost memories.
When we meet August, she’s an anthropologist in her mid-30s who has returned to Brooklyn after a long absence to bury her father. She has an accidental run-in with an old friend — more like a sister, really — that triggers remembrances. The rest of the novel is a flashback to early adolescence. August narrates her own story.
We begin with eight-year-old August moving from a dilapidated Tennessee farm to New York City with her father and younger brother. The Vietnam War claimed her mother’s younger brother and the loss drove her mother to an early grave.
In those early days in Brooklyn, a trio of girls — Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela — soon become her confidants. The longing for connection is palpable, both to readers and her newfound friends.
What did you see in me? I’d ask years later. Who did you see standing there?
You looked lost, Gigi whispered. Lost and beautiful.
The new foursome blend so tightly that even their descriptions on the page feel fluid. The three girls become kin to August, the intimacy of their relationship soothing but never extinguishing her grief: “…I had Sylvia, Angela and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.”
They all navigate complicated home lives, short-lived romances and persistent predators, giving each other tips on how to protect their bodies. (They all know to avoid the owner of the shoe repair shop: He’ll offer you a quarter to see your panties.)
Woodson is a master at summoning small details — the glint of a wrench used to twist off a fire hydrant cap, the tips of toes hanging over the edge of too-small shoes — and at painting a portrait of a neighborhood in flux. There are no throwaway sentences in Another Brooklyn — each short, poetic line feels carefully loved and polished. The first half of this novel asks urgent questions; the second delivers uneasy, heartbreaking answers. At its core, this book is about fragility, how light shines in the broken places.
While most of the characters are vibrant and well-drawn, it is surprising that our protagonist is so mysterious. The readers don’t really know August beyond her grief. Woodson keeps the details scant: August is a protective big sister and a dutiful daughter. But what defines August, through all 170 pages, is her inability to cope with the foundational loss of her mother. Every page holds a dull ache.
Asked to name her influences by Booklist, Woodson said, “Two major writers for me are James Baldwin and Virginia Hamilton. It blew me away to find out that Virginia Hamilton was a sister like me. Later, Nikki Giovanni had a similar effect on me. I feel that I learned how to write from Baldwin. He was onto some future stuff, writing about race and gender long before people were comfortable with those dialogues. He would cross class lines all over the place, and each of his characters was remarkably believable. I still pull him down from my shelf when I feel stuck.”
Woodson has spent the last two decades crafting smart young adult fiction and poetry, most recently winning the National Book Award in 2014 for her poetic memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming. Woodson’s return to adult fiction doesn’t stray far from her comfort zone; minus a few scenes, Another Brooklyn would work entirely as a young adult novel. It is one that strengthens as the pages pile up.
In absorbing August’s journey, we’re reminded that our teenage selves still roam within, only tempered by time and adult responsibility. But Another Brooklyn brings them back to the forefront, asking us, Who were you when you were 15?
by Charles Ellenbogen
With all of the recent discussion about the changing faces on U.S. currency, some controversy emerged over a seemingly safe and definitely popular choice – Harriet Tubman. How many people, some asked, did she really lead to freedom? Do we really want the story of slavery memorialized on money? And, most persuasively, would Tubman herself have wanted this honor?
By not bringing up her name in his breathtakingly great new book, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, winner of the 2002 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for John Henry Days continues this conversation. Like most movements, the Railroad was made up of both the heroic conductors such as Tubman and the many nameless others who aided escaping slaves. Cora, Whitehead’s protagonist, and Caesar, who inspires Cora to run, make use of the Railroad on their escape.
But this is not Tubman’s railroad. Whitehead has, instead, imagined an actual train that runs underground. This is in keeping with Whitehead’s fictional moves elsewhere – he takes reality and winds it even more tightly to create a hybrid. This is not magical realism; this is Whitehead’s world. It is life intensified.
As with many journey stories, there are echoes of the Odyssey here. Indeed, Whitehead even has named a 10-year old former slave Homer. He drives a carriage for Ridgeway, a kind of Inspector Javert of slave hunters. Having failed to catch Cora’s mother, Mabel, Ridgeway is obsessed with capturing Cora, who is escaping from Georgia. Homer, having been freed, stays with Ridgeway; he has nowhere else to go. In fact, “Each night with meticulous care, Homer opened his satchel and removed a set of manacles. He locked himself to the driver’s seat, put the key in his pocket, and closed his eyes. Ridgeway caught Cora looking. ‘He says it’s the only way he can sleep.’” The soul aches. Absolutely.
While he does not shy away from the intricate details of suffering (you’ll want to look away, but you won’t), Whitehead’s language is both spartan and evocative. Near the novel’s beginning, Whitehead recounts the story of Ajarry, Cora’s grandmother being captured and sold. He explains that two “yellow-haired sailors rowed Ajarry out to the ship, humming. White skin like bone.” The language evokes the bones of the Middle Passage that Ajarry is about to take. We register the harshness – humming while taking someone to be sold – and the abruptness of the word ‘bone.’ The sailors, having lost their humanity, have become skeletons of human beings. When it comes to Whitehead’s writing, less is definitely more. Much more.
In the end, though, The Underground Railroad is not just Cora’s story. Or even the story of her family. It is a story about stories – the stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories our documents give us, the stories we find in libraries and museums and on money, the stories that are forbidden to us, the stories of America. “Truth was a changing display in a shop window,” Whitehead writes, “manipulated by hands when you weren’t looking, alluring and ever out of reach.”
In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen offers a test of this premise. He suggests choosing one element in American history to track how it is treated in different sources over time. I chose John Brown. In some textbooks, he was absent or limited to a brief mention as a lunatic. In other texts, he earned several paragraphs and was depicted as a hero. “Cora blamed the people who wrote it down. People always got things wrong, on purpose as much as by accident,” Whitehead writes. This happens in textbooks. Novels too. Whitehead has gotten the Underground Railroad wrong, deliberately wrong, but to fault him is to miss the point. We must look, and we cannot look away. Whether we read, see an exhibit or watch a movie, we should do both and we should ask ourselves why we need to do both.
Whitehead is already racking up acclaim for this novel. Oprah chose it for her book club. The New York Times chose excerpts from it for its first broadsheet. There are, I am sure, more prizes in his future.
And I am happy for Whitehead’s success. It is time to move past considering him as a one or two-hit wonder — he wrote Zone One and Sag Harbor — and to start considering his work as a whole. If you haven’t read any of his work, The Underground Railroad is a great place to start. Some reviewers have noted how the novel resonates with today’s headlines. While this is true, such comments diminish the book. This novel will outlast headlines. It speaks to the truths underneath them. I read The Underground Railroad and was moved. Things I thought I knew shifted, sometimes slightly and sometimes violently. I was spectator, bystander, and, as hard as it is to admit it, participant. The novel is a journey, from captivity to freedom, from south to north, from past to present. It’s quite a ride.
Charles Ellenbogen teaches English at John F. Kennedy – Eagle Academy in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
There are 108 tally marks on the cover of The Fire This Time, the new essay collection that brings forth 18 perspectives from a new generation of writers, working in the tradition of James Baldwin. Each mark represents a black life lost too soon, a visual representation of the urgency of #BlackLivesMatter.
In the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013, Jesmyn Ward went to Twitter to share her frustration, but found the platform too ephemeral. She was much more struck by the pertinence of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Ward, editor of this anthology, decided she wanted a book that “would reckon with the fire of rage and despair and fierce protective love currently sweeping through the streets and campuses of America.”
The results are mostly successful. The Fire Next Time contains a broad spectrum of essays that tackle everything from Phillis Wheatley’s mysterious marriage to Rachel Dolezal’s recent identity hoax, an engaging concoction of both the historical and contemporary. Eleven of the 18 pieces are original, with the rest published between 2014 and 2015.
The Fire This Time opens with Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition,” a 14-line poem that links the imagery of a brilliantly colorful meadow with the brutal deaths of John Crawford, Eric Garner and Mike Brown. Its early inclusion instructs us to get unsettled. (Brown won an Anisfield-Wolf book award last year for The New Testament.)
After a sturdy and moving introduction, the book falls into three parts – Legacy, Reckoning and Jubilee. In “Da Art of Storytellin’” Kiese Laymon’s fuses of his grandmother’s 30 years of hard work at a chicken processing plant with the Southern stank of Outkast’s Atlanta classics. Emily Raboteau criss-crossed four of New York’s boroughs to capture anti-police brutality murals in “Know Your Rights!” Isabel Wilkerson, who won a 2011 Anisfield-Wolf award for her Great Migration history, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” revisits 150 years of U.S. history in a slim three pages called“Where Do We Go from Here?” Her precise retelling comes with parting encouragement: “We must know deep in our bones and in our hearts that if the ancestors could survive the Middle Passage, we can survive anything.”
Still, reading most of these essays feels heavy. The collective thesis is that Black life in America, like Claudia Rankine posits in her essay, is “the condition of mourning.” But as Ta-Nehisi Coates once wrote to his son, echoing the advice of generations before him: “That this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within all of it.”
Edwidge Danticat, who took home an Anisfield-Wolf award in 2005 for The Dew Breakers, closes the book with a powerful message to her two young daughters, born in the “Yes We Can” era of Barack Obama’s first presidential run. Danticat, born in Haiti and raised partly in New York, offers a view of refugee status — a position held both by immigrants and some U.S. citizens: “The message we always heard from those who were meant to protect us: that we should either die or go somewhere else.”
Still, Danticat fortifies her daughters against this, encouraging them to seek joy: “When that day of jubilee finally arrives, all of us will be there with you, walking, heads held high, crowns a-glitter, because we do have a right to be here.”
by Valentino L. Zullo, Teaching Fellow, Kent State University and Ohio Center for the Book Scholar-in-Residence at Cleveland Public Library
The Marvel universe is expanding once again — – this time making history. At the San Diego Comic Con in July, Marvel announced a new World of Wakanda series, penned by “Bad Feminist” author Roxane Gay, making this the first time in 77 years of publishing that a black woman has written for the comic book giant.
Sure, Marvel Comics has featured stories with powerful black female characters including Storm and Misty Knight (created by the local Cleveland author Tony Isabella), but not one has gotten her voice from a black female author. Are these recent developments truly progress?
As an avid reader of comics, and a frequent apologist, I had to wonder: how to think about Gene Luan Yang’s New Super-Man, the first issue of which was published this month by DC Comics, or the ongoing Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates? I soon realized, though, that while these stories were written by men of color, they were still men. Even the exciting news of a new Invincible Iron Man series, in which Tony Stark will pass the torch to a 15-year- old black girl, Riri Williams, was muted a bit by the fact that her creator, Brian Michael Bendis, is a white man. “A black woman won’t pick up the paycheck for a story about a black girl, especially after Marvel has reaped so much goodwill and praise for introducing one?” critic Abraham Riesman asked in response to the news.
Perhaps even more disheartening is the fact that while Yang, Coates and Gay represent change in terms of hiring in superhero comics, we must remember that this is not these are not their day jobs. None of them will be the backbone of the industry. They are just visiting. There is still much work to be done to insure that the pillars of the comics industry are representative of those reading the stories. Another problem — one too large for this blog — is the erasure of women and people of color from the annals of the comics industry. (Many forget already that Jenette Kahn was the President of DC Comics for nearly 20 years.)
Still, I do want to celebrate the moves toward diversity in the realm of superhero comics. There are more women working at Marvel than ever before. Indeed, I praise Sana Amanat as one of Marvel’s best editors, and G. Willow Wilson, Chelsea Cain or Kelly Sue DeConnick as some of their strongest creators. However, I believe that we can celebrate and also ask for more. It is also problematic when some of the most iconic black female superheroes are still written by white men and have never been written by a black female creator.
While black women may not be writing for Marvel en masse, they are indeed creating comics. You can find a list of creators at Ormes Society, named for Jackie Ormes, who was the first female African-American cartoonist to produce a syndicated comic strip. (You can learn more of her story in Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist.) Other notable black women include Felicia D. Henderson, who wrote for DC Comics with Teen Titans and Static Shock and Whit Taylor, who has won the Glyph Comics Award.
A panel from Jackie Ormes’ comic strip in the 1930s, Torchy Brown in “Dixie to Harlem”
Black women have been creating comics for decades, even as the major comics companies have not invested in their talents. Gay noted that she understands the role she’s occupying in history. “It doesn’t make sense that I’m the first, in 2016,” Gay tweeted. “But I won’t be the last.”
Join the conversation about women in comics at the Kent State University and Cleveland Public Library Wonder Woman Symposium in Cleveland September 22-24, 2016. See the website for the event info here: www.kent.edu/wonderwoman
The former poet laureate and Akron native will return to the region that raised her to celebrate her new “Collected Poems” and for the 30th anniversary of her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, “Thomas and Beulah.”
“An Evening with Rita Dove & Friends” serves as an intellectual appetizer for our 2016 awards ceremony, with jury chair Henry Louis Gates and all five 2016 winners — Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mary Morris, Orlando Patterson, Lillian Faderman and Brian Seibert — scheduled to attend. Poet Toi Derricotte, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for “The Black Notebooks” in 1998, will introduce her friend to a hometown crowd.
The evening is co-sponsored by Brews and Prose, the literary series.
Published in 1986, “Thomas and Beulah” is based loosely on Dove’s maternal grandparents and is set in Akron. It traces their lives through the birth of her grandfather Thomas in the early 20th century until the death of her grandmother, whose actual name was Georgianna, in the 1960s.
“This is the quintessential moment to celebrate Rita Dove in her beloved community,” said Karen R. Long, manager of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for the Cleveland Foundation. “She has served more than 20 years as an indispensable juror, and she has elevated American literature with her poems and teaching and editing. For most of us, that began with ‘Thomas and Beulah,’ which brought a black, middle-class, mid-American couple into our collective literary consciousness.”
The celebration begins at 7:30 p.m. on September 14 in the Maltz Performing Arts Center on the Case Western Reserve University campus. Tickets are free and parking is $7. Tickets for parking and for the event are available here or by calling 216-368-6062.
Riders heading to downtown Cleveland on the RTA’s Red Line may have noticed quite a few more pops of color adorning the city landscape over the past two weeks. The colors have a story, and each story comes from a work or writer in the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award canon.
Inter|Urban, the collaboration among the City of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation, North East Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, RTA and LAND studio, has filled the 19-mile stretch from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and into downtown Cleveland with bright, vibrant murals. Coming up in time for the Republican National Convention in July will be two photo installations. All the art is inspired by Anisfield-Wolf texts and writers.
Seventeen artists from around the world converged on Cleveland in June for a public art blitz, creating an outdoor gallery and anchoring installations at the airport and Terminal Tower. Eight artists are based in Cleveland, with the others representing South Africa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Hawaii, and Florida.
“This marvelous project moves the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards out into the city, showcased through original art spaced along the everyday paths of thousands of commuters,” said Karen R. Long, who manages the prize. “We expect the murals and the photography to start important conversations and serve as gateways to the books themselves, and the galvanizing ideas they contain.”
View the artworks below and hear from the artists in their own words how each piece came to be. Photos, unless otherwise specified, taken by Brandon Shigeta:
ARTIST: Aaron De La Cruz INSPIRATION: “Sophie Climbing the Stairs,” a poem from Dolores Kendrick’s The Women of Plums, which won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1990, and consist of poems in the voices of slave women. LOCATION: Lorain Avenue underpass
San Francisco muralist Aaron De La Cruz drew inspiration from a selection of Dolores Kendrick’s “Sophie Climbing the Stairs,” about an enslaved woman sneaking off to read. The passage evoked a memory of his parents speaking in Spanish to keep their conversations a mystery to the young De La Cruz and his brother. Drawing off the theme of literacy, his mural features deconstructed letters and punctuation marks.
ARTIST: Alan Giberson INSPIRATION: The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley, a 1966 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner LOCATION: W.25th and Columbus Street
Cleveland artist Alan Giberson’s mural came from a brief scene in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, when a New York Times reporter meets the civil rights leader for the first time. “Noblesse Oblige” is a French phrase referring the responsibility of those with privilege to extend generosity to those less fortunate. The artist, who specializes in hand-painted signage and gold-leaf lettering, was eager to tackle this project. “This was a big challenge, being the largest thing I’ve ever painted.”
ARTIST: Amber Esner INSPIRATION: The End by Elizabeth Alexander from American Sublime. The poet won for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. LOCATION: East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station
Amber Esner, a Cleveland illustrator, was struck by Alexander’s ode to the dissolution of a relationship, as she lists the items left behind after a breakup. “My concept is based around the process of how people deal with loss by letting go of — or holding on to — specific objects,” she writes.
ARTIST: Margaret Kimball INSPIRATION: Martha Collins, White Pages The poet won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2007 for Blue Front. LOCATION: W.25th and Columbus Street
Cleveland illustrator and writer Margaret Kimball drew upon Martha Collins’ White Pages, a collection of untitled poems that explore white privilege and the ongoing racial divide in America. Kimball latched on to the repetition of the phrase “Yes, but” within the poem and used a minimalist color scheme to make one word prominent—YES. “The word is inclusive and strong and in this case has no strings attached, nothing to interrupt it,” Kimball writes.
ARTIST: Louise “Ouizi” Chen INSPIRATION: “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros, who won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1993 for her story collection that contains “Eleven.” LOCATION: Overpass Pillars, beneath I-480 & I-71. Photo by Louise “Ouizi” Chen
If you happen to be in the passenger seat as you’re driving to and from Cleveland Hopkins airport, take a look around to see if you can spot these 35-foot tall overpass pillars, designed by Detroit artist Louise Chen. “The totem pillars are a celebration of the way cultures represent themselves in the language of ornament, with design inspired by many different cultures spanning the world,” she writes.
ARTIST: Nosego INSPIRATION: A. Van Jordan’s “The Atom and Hawkman Discuss Metaphysics” from his 2007 collection, Quantum Lyrics He won an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 2005 for his collection M*A*C*N*O*L*I*A. LOCATION: Temple Façade, east of Tower City Station
The Philadelphia-based artist describes this piece, titled “Unmask,” as “a visual metaphor about self-awareness, self-reflection and perception.”
ARTIST: Osman Muhammad INSPIRATION: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2011) by David Eltis and David Richardson & A Holocaust Called Hiroshima by Ronald Takaki, who won an Anisfield-Wolf award in 1994 LOCATION: East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station
Cleveland artist Osmad Muhammad used his mural to make a statement about national and global atrocities. The burning woman in foreground is a reference to Hiroshima and the burning ships depict the slave trade throughout the Americas.
ARTIST: Ryan Jaenke INSPIRATION: Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes LOCATION: W.25th and Columbus Street
Published in 1951, Langston Hughes‘ Montage of a Dream Deferred reads like a jazz record, full of conflicting rhythms and short bursts of animation. Cleveland artist Ryan Jaenke took Hughes’ melody and translated it to this mural on Cleveland’s west side. Hughes won his Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1954.
ARTIST: Jasper Wong INSPIRATION: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2008 LOCATION: Old Abutment West, east of Tower City Station
Jasper Wong, Hawaiian artist and co-curator of the Interurban project, explored the themes of luck that featured prominently in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. He peppered his mural with black cats and broken down cars (symbols of bad luck) and rabbits (symbols of good luck).
ARTIST: Ellen Rutt INSPIRATION: “The Danger of a Single Story” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 TED talk She won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her novel “Half of a Yellow Sun” in 2007. LOCATION: Underpass pillars on I-90W
Detroit artist Ellen Rutt used bold geometric patterns to transform these underpass pillars. Her “Patchwork Cleveland” mural was inspired by Adichie’s call to avoid “making generalizations about culture based on a singular experience or limited knowledge.” When Rutt moved to Detroit in 2011, she quickly realized the broader narrative about the Rust Belt city was flawed. “It was in Detroit, surrounded by amazing street art, that my interest in murals grew from awefilled admiration, to an unstoppable desire and ultimately, an incredibly important part of my art practice,” she writes.
ARTIST: Darius Steward INSPIRATION: The Rain by John Edgar Wideman, who won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 LOCATION: New East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station
A Cleveland native, Darius Steward is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art. His mural features yellow as a primary color, the prominent color from John Edgar Wideman’s short story, “The Rain.”
ARTIST: Faith47 INSPIRATION: Language as a boundary by Wole Soyinka. He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1983 for his memoir Ake: The Years of Childhood, and again for Lifetime Achievement in 2013. LOCATION: Old Abutment East
South African artist Faith47 brought her international murals to Cleveland as part of her Psychic Power of Animals series, which attempts to “bring the energy of nature back into the urban metropolis.”
“There’s an inherent irony in recreating nature on cement, so the series is a nostalgic reminder of what we’ve lost but also an attempt to reintegrate that into the present,” Faith47 writes on her website. “We have become so distanced from nature, so these murals are an attempt to reconnect us with the natural world.”
ARTIST: Brendan Monroe INSPIRATION: The Boat by Nam Le This short story collection won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2009. LOCATION: Mirrored wall
San Francisco artist Brendan Monroe took cues from the dangerous sea voyage in Nam Le’s The Boat as he created this expansive mural. Look closely and you can see a child overboard.
ARTIST: Katy Kosman INSPIRATION: The short story “5 Dollar Bill” from Dorothy West’s collection The Richer the Poorer. West won our lifetime achievement award in 1996. LOCATION: New East 9th Street Wall, east of Tower City Station. Photo by Amber Esner
“My father and I had a complicated relationship like the one in the story,” Kosman wrote, “and he died when I was fairly young, but he taught me most of the lessons I use now in my everyday life.”
ARTIST: Pat Perry INSPIRATION: Edith Anisfield-Wolf, founder of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
If Edith Anisfield Wolf were alive today,” Detroit artist Pat Perry wrote, “I think she’d be encouraging us all to take direct aim at the great moral and social crises of our time. I can earnestly say that I think she’d be proud to see folks employing ideals taught to us by the past, in order to tackle issues of the present.”
Following in our tradition, each of our winners will speak at the awards ceremony, and each will talk and read separately in a second, more intimate setting in Northeast Ohio. Mark your calendars and make plans to join us in September for a string of these illuminating events, designed to bring readers and winners into each other’s orbits.
Mary Morris, The Jazz Palace South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch, along with jazz pianist Jackie Warren and jazz trumpeter Kenny Davis
Cuyahoga County Public Library Wednesday, September 14
4-5:30 p.m.
Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle “A Very Long and (Almost) Victorious Battle: The Struggle for Gay Civil Rights”
The City Club of Cleveland Friday, September 16, noon Register here
Brian Seibert, What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing Beck Center for the Arts Friday, September 16
5-6 p.m.
by Gail Arnoff
“I was not sorry when my brother died.”
So begins Tsi Tsi Dangarembga’s semi-autobiographical novel Nervous Conditions, the story of Tambudzai, a teenage girl in (the former Rhodesia now Zimbabwe) who lives in two worlds: that of her parents, poor farmers who earn a meager living, and that of her aunt and uncle, whom the British colonists have chosen to receive an education in England and eventually to run the missionary school.
I fell in love with Tambu in the first few pages, and as I introduce her to more readers, I have discovered that they take her to their hearts as well. This includes participants in a Books@Work group, women who are thirty to sixty-five, and college students in a “Questions of Identity” seminar. Until I requested it, the Cleveland libraries did not even own a copy of Nervous Conditions, but I consider Nervous Conditions a classic deserving of a wider readership.
When I mention the title, people often think that I am referring to a book on psychology. However, the title comes from a quote by Franz Fanon, a psychiatrist, writer, and revolutionary who declared in his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that “the condition of the native is a nervous condition.” Dangrembga’s semi-autobiographical novel suggests that like the natives living in what was called Rhodesia until 1980,Tambu also struggles against her condition, not only as a native, but as a girl living in a patriarchal society.
The plot is complex, but fairly easy to follow as Tambu sets out to explain, in the opening chapters of the book, why she is not sorry her brother has died. (No spoiler alert here, as it is best to let Tambu explain herself.) We meet other members of her family, including Jeremiah, her lazy, demanding father; Mainini, her mostly submissive mother; her Uncle Babamukuru, who heads the family and the mission school; Maiguru, Babamukuru’s college-educated wife who continues to kowtow to her husband’s many needs; and Nyasha, Tambu’s troubled female cousin, who plays a major role in introducing Tambu to a new world.
The Books@Work group related easily to Tambu’s brave response as she comes to understand the patriarchy of her family, members of the Shona group. Many readers recognized themselves in Tambu’s spirited rebellion and determination to become an educated, independent woman. Several readers recounted their own teenage adventures, as well as those of their teenage daughters. We laughed often when sharing stories of sneaking out to see a boy or taking that first sip of beer. In more serious discussions, we listened to a participant who grew up in Nigeria and another married to a man from Zimbabwe. Both provided insights into customs and issues that frame Tambu and her family. These women’s experiences added richness to discussions fueled by Tambu’s resourcefulness and tenacity.
My college students, much closer to Tambu’s age, were often outraged — particularly at the patriarchy and the colonialism. When Babamukuru and his family return from England to Rhodesia, their acquaintances treat them differently. They have become, as Nyasha says, “hybrids.” At her uncle’s house Tambu is shocked when Anna, a woman working for the Babamukurus, kneels down in front of the two girls to tell them that dinner is ready. Nyasha tells Anna to get up, but “Anna continue[s] her message on her knees.” These scenes shocked some students, most of whom have never seen the stark discrimination and race separations confronting Tambu and her cousin.
Nevertheless, students who come from places quite different than 20th century Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, are drawn again and again to the characters in Nervous Conditions. “I found myself relating to [Tambu’s] thought processes and parts of her personality, in particular the way she takes on the role of observer in many situations,” wrote one first-generation American whose parents are Chinese. Another student said that reading the novel was “like walking into a swimming pool: I felt pretty cold when I first started reading, but I got warmer and more engaged as I got to know the characters and began to puzzle out the themes.” Yet another young man was surprised by his connection to Tambu and wrote that “though I did not know what to think at first, Nervous Conditions and Tambu have garnered a special place in my heart and I thoroughly enjoyed watching both of them exceed my preconceptions and expectations.”
For both groups of readers, Dangarembga’s writing seemed more straightforward than lyrical; it is the responses of her characters that kindled interest. Tambu “does not look back on her life with kind or insensitive eyes,” one student wrote. “Instead, she is pragmatic and honest. She acknowledges the nostalgia that may or may not have seeped into her narrative, but otherwise, Tambu is a shrewd and reliable narrator. I appreciated Tambu’s fairness.”
Maybe it is especially that “fairness” that wins over readers. Tambu tells her story without pronouncing judgements or offering solutions. She reports that she has gone through a “process whose events stretched over many years and would fill another volume, but the story I have told here, is my own story, the story of four women whom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began.” Dangarembga wrote another novel, a sequel to Nervous Conditions called The Book of Not.
Next up: my book club will discuss Nervous Conditions. We have just read two novels by African authors, Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, and Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won an Annisfield Wolf award for Half the Yellow Sun in 2007. These novels are as different from one another as one can imagine. I am keen to hear yet another group’s response to Nervous Conditions, and I hope that my friends, like me, will open their hearts to Tambu, just as the other groups have. But that is a tale for another time.
Gail Arnoff received her B.A. from Western Reserve University and her M.A. from John Carroll University, where she currently teaches in the English Department. She also facilitates a seminar, “Questions of Identity,” in the SAGES program at Case Western Reserve University.
In one compelling segment from the 2014 documentary, “I’m Not Racist…Am I?” high school students huddle around a board game modeled loosely after the game “Life.”
This one is called “American Dream.”
To play, each student takes on an identity different from their own. So a young black student is now a middle-class white male; a white peer is now a lower-class Asian woman. As they move the pieces around the board, players hear instructions that begin to heavily favor a certain demographic: “All females lose one turn” follows “LGBT players move back one space,” which follows “All welfare recipients move back five spaces.”
At the end, the young black student — playing the game as a white male — threw up his hands in victory. “I just kept moving forward,” he says, “while everyone else got pushed back.”
This quick lesson in privilege is the cornerstone of the prickly 90-minute film. For one full school year, filmmakers followed 12 New York teens as they dove into an intensive anti-racism curriculum developed by The Calhoun School, a prestigious college preparatory institution in Manhattan. The film is part of a larger initiative called Deconstructing Race. It aims to begin educating its students, teachers and families about structural systemic racism.
The Cleveland chapter of Facing History and Ourselves organized a May screening at John Carroll University. Organizers broke the film into three chunks with ample time for the audience — high school students, teachers and community members — to share their reactions in between.
While 12 students participated, filmmakers focused primarily on five students:
Kahleek, a black 17-year-old from Brooklyn, who is teased by his family and peers for skateboarding and other markers of “white” behavior
Martha, a 15-year-old whose white family is the only one in her subsidized Harlem apartment building
Abby, a 16-year-old biracial girl struggling with identity in Manhattan
Sacha, a self-described liberal 16-year-old from the Upper West Side, who says it’s just coincidence that his friends are all white
Anna, an adopted 17-year-old Korean American student who says if not for the mirror, she’d think she was white
Viewers see the students wrestle with identity, stereotypes and prejudice. To launch the program, the participants attended a weekend retreat to root their conversations in shared language. First on the menu: What does racism mean?
The facilitators of the “Undoing Racism” workshop defined racism as race prejudice plus power, which exists in two forms: individual bigotry and institutional control. Racism exists, the facilitator told the students, primarily to uphold white supremacy.
“So are all white people racist?” one student asked. The facilitator didn’t hesitate: “Yes.” The students look dazed, a mixture of confusion and shock as they let the answer land.
In another workshop on the “N-Word,” facilitator Dr. Eddie Moore Jr., an African-American man in a pinstriped shirt and vest, asked the group to close their eyes and imagine that “a nigger has just walked into the room.”
“What did you see when I said that?” he asked. A handful of students’ erupted in response: “Sagging pants…gold teeth…Kunta Kinte.” But one student, Sacha, made the Cleveland audience gasp with his answer: “I saw you.”
Moore latched onto the moment.
“It doesn’t matter how you articulate, it doesn’t matter what degree you get, it doesn’t matter how hard you study, doesn’t matter how many books you read,” he said. “The only thing they see when they see you is that…and then that kid doesn’t make it home from the store.”
During one of the breaks, director Catherine Wigginton Greene conceded that the film doesn’t offer solutions, but rather exists to expand the conversation. “We want white people to watch this film and know that [this discussion on racism] is very much about them,” she said.
And after more workshops, Sacha, at least, appeared to hear the message. On camera, he admitted he saw the wrongness of his response to facilitator Moore’s prompt.
National Poetry Month, celebrated every April for the past 20 years, became a little less abstract for Cleveland students this spring. This year the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards embedded local graduate students in two Cleveland-area elementary schools and a community center for an eight-week poetry residency.
Ryan Lind, Ali McClain, Karly Milvet, and Amanda Stovicek — all students in the NEOMFA creative writing consortium — drew inspiration from the Anisfield-Wolf canon in crafting their lessons, sampling Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton and Langston Hughes, as well as recent winners Adrian Matejka and Jericho Brown.
Stovicek taught fourth and fifth-graders at Urban Community School, her second experience in the classroom with younger students. “One student wrote, ‘Sometimes it feels like the last bee in the hive and the last one to get honey.’ What a startling wonderful poetic connection. The voices of these children are just waiting to be heard.”
McClain, an MFA student and director of the Sisterhood program at West Side Community House, used the residency to help her students discuss race, gender, violence and trauma through a poet’s lens. “The Sisterhood girls responded to poetry the same way most students respond to something new — with hesitancy and curiosity,” McClain recalled. “But by the time our second session took place the girls were approaching me with poems they wrote on their own time. I wasn’t shocked because I know that this is what poetry does — it pulls people in.”
A Greenview Upper Elementary school student recites his poem at the April poetry slam as his student-teacher Karly Milvet looks on.
Lind and Milvet used Lucille Clifton’s “Won’t You Celebrate With Me” and George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m From” to engage their Greenview Upper Elementary students in a lesson on identity and origin. “One of my favorite lessons,” Milvet said, “and the students’ too, was Langston Hughes ‘Hey!’ and ‘Hey! Hey!’ because they got to explore repetition and rhythm and colloquialism. Overall, I think we succeeded in making poetry accessible and fun.”
Lind agreed: “I love the calm moment that follows our group activities when individuals start grinding out their own work, raising their hands with pride with each interesting word or phrase.”
To cap the enriching experience, students at all three locations were invited to perform in a poetry slam at Urban Community School on Cleveland’s west side.
One by one students filed onto the stage to recite their poetry. Students from Greenview Upper Elementary wore sunglasses as they shared their work, and fourth-graders from Urban Community donned their “Word Nerd” shirts from Kent State’s Wick Poetry Center.
Several students recited their remixed version of “Won’t You Celebrate With Me” into their own odes of lip balm, basketball championships, and school awards. In his version, Brandon Johnson, of Greenview, mused about winning a character award: “When I get it/It will be because of my hard work/So let me get started/today.”
“Sometimes my heart feels like a baseball thrown into the air/Sometimes my heart is hoping for a scarf against the cold,” Lily Tidrick of Urban Community School wrote in “My Heart.”
“It snows ten times a day/And you make it feel like 100 degrees,” Shantrel Anthony, a student from the West Side Community House, wrote in her poem, “Miracle.”
Awards manager Karen R. Long envisioned the partnership as a potent artistic brew. “What better way to pass 80 years of the Anisfield-Wolf tradition to two generations simultaneously?” Long said. “Our marvelous MFA graduate students amplified their commitment to literature all spring by introducing grade school children to poetry via their own voices.”
The parents in the audience were moved by the hard work of their children. “Wick Poetry Center assistant director Nicole Robinson overheard one parent exclaim about their child: ‘I had no idea he could write!'” Long said. “That is a magical discovery.”
Listen to three of the students as they recite their poetry.
Brandon Johnson, “Won’t You Celebrate With Me”
Lily Tidrick, “My Heart”
Beyonce Smith, “Characterize”
Hours before accepting her 2015 Anisfield-Wolf award, Marilyn Chin claimed “activist poet” as her mantle: “I’ve been writing poetry to right the wrongs of the world, to express my Chinese-American sensibility, to work for this utopian American future.”
Chin, a professor at San Diego State University teaching this year at Smith College, collected the prize for Hard Love Province, her fourth volume of poetry. Juror Rita Dove praised her work as “icy yet inflamed.”
Her new poem, “Peony,” is featured for some 350,000 subscribers to the American Academy of Poet’s digitally-delivered “Poem-A-Day.” This new work continues the elegiac notes found in Hard Love Province, lamenting on the passage of time.
Chin explained the origins of “Peony” to the staff at the academy: “In Beijing, a student named Lin gave me a vase of huge, gorgeous peonies for my birthday. “I went away for a few days and returned to a disaster! The peonies had wilted so terribly that they made me cry. Alas, the shock of recognition. Buddha warned us about ‘old age, sickness and death.’ All living beings, poets and peonies alike, must meet our eventual demise!”
Peony
by Marilyn Chin
Why must I tell you this story, O little one
You’re just a bud-of-a-girl, who knows nothing
Now you are full-faced, bright as sun
Now you open your skirts pink, layered, brazen
Suffering is alchemy, change is God
Now you droop your head, heavy with rust
Sit, contemplate, what did Buddha say?
Old age, sickness, death, no one owns eternity
Detach, detach, look away from the sun
Let your petals fall aimlessly
Don’t despair, little one, we are done
Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ second book of poetry, Heaven, brims with 38 poems that ask “Who the hell’s Heaven is this?” and then splinters the answers into a night sky’s worth of possibilities. The poet insists on the strangeness of difference. “Lyric steeped in beauty, in exhilaration; when Phillips writes about jazz or the Wu-Tang Clan, the quotidian is lifted onto a plain as mythical and fateful as the battlefields of Troy,” says jurist Rita Dove. While the classics reverberate here, so do references to roosters in Ohio, Led Zeppelin riffs in the basement and bears in Colorado. Phillips, who lives in New York and Barcelona, also writes about basketball and soccer for the Paris Review and The New Yorker.
The Jazz Palaceis the 15th book of Mary Morris, one she spent almost 20 years writing. It features three central characters: a black trumpeter, a Jewish pianist and a saloon owner in Prohibition-era Chicago. The story is drenched in a remarkable period of experimentation when music got faster, skirts got shorter and the appetite for pleasure surged. Jurist Rita Dove writes as a reader, “Here I was, drenched in the soot and stink and noise of early 20th-century Chicago, walking along the docks, threading through the alleys, listening to a trumpet wail from a corner saloon.” Born in Chicago, Morris is a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
In vivid prose, and through the voices of 150 interview subjects, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Strugglechronicles a journey out of the closet, onto the streets and into the beginnings of legal protections for millions of Americans. Lillian Fadermancrafts a meticulous history — 128 pages of footnotes, included — that documents the women and men who sacrificed and persevered to make a place in this nation for their dignity, decency and humanity. Juror Steven Pinker praised it as “a real milestone.” Faderman grew up in New York City and Los Angeles, became a leading historian of lesbian and LGBT narratives, and is a now a retired professor from the California State University, Fresno.
Orlando Patterson is a preeminent American sociologist, whose landmark books have influenced the course of global scholarship: Slavery and Social Death (1982), Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), The Ordeal of Integration (1997), and The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth(2015). Praised as a Renaissance scholar by his peers, Patterson served eight years as advisor for social policy and development to Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. He helped found Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples and is an expert on the sociology of sports, particularly cricket. Called the “Caribbean Zola” by London’s Daily Telegraph, Patterson is a professor at Harvard University.
What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing is a revelatory and racially complex chronicle of a uniquely American art form, with roots that predate the nation in West Africa and Ireland. Brian Seibert, a dance critic for The New York Times, took 10 years to write his first book, praised by jurist Simon Schama as “a brilliant read from beginning to end — recovering a whole universe of dance, race, rhythm — and doing it in such a winning style. It just made me want to dance immediately every time I finished a chapter.” With nuance, sophistication, suavity and wit, this history profiles dance geniuses in what has often been an outsider art. Seibert, born and raised in Los Angeles, is himself a dancer. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
by Gary Stonum
In electoral politics you must choose one candidate. In identity politics, it is often the same. As Warren Duffy, the African American narrator in the 2015 novel Loving Day, tells his newly discovered teenage daughter Tal, “There’s Team White and Team Black, okay? You probably didn’t even know you were on Team White.”
Of course, things are not so simple. Like author Mat Johnson, Duffy identifies as black but looks white, “the human equivalent of mismatched socks.” Repeatedly, he must perform his race in order to fit in. Worse, 17-year-old Tal, who is actually darker than her father, has been raised Jewish since her mother died, and was, as her father puts it, “casually racist.”
This may sound like the setup for a 21st century update of a tragic mulatto plot. Johnson instead writes the comic mulatto novel. Many of the scenes in Loving Day are hilarious, the literary equivalent of Key & Peele sketches expanded into a full Marx Brothers movie. But like those confections, Johnson’s plot is secondary – and generally less successful than the sharply witty observations and wacky set pieces. In this, the novel is much like Pym, Johnson’s less ambitious, more focused 2011 book that established his reputation as a satirist in the tradition of George Schuyler and Ishmael Reed.
Duffy, packing an extra dose of double consciousness because of his skin color, understands all too well the guilty satisfaction his peers take for “sitting in judgment over others for insufficient blackness.” Our protagonist notes, “Black people aren’t used to not having the final say on race in America; it’s uncomfortable.”
Learning the name of one Sunita Habersham, Duffy observes that the British identify class from accent but “in African America first names offer not only class and region but year” of birth. She predates the “celebrity insane-name movement, which means her parents were also hippies and most likely young and idealistic when she was born.”
But Duffy, back in the U.S. from Wales and a wife who has just divorced him, has more pressing problems. Broke, feckless and a failed at his chosen profession as a comic-book artist, he has inherited from his father a dilapidated, roofless, and haunted colonial mansion. It sits incongruously on seven acres of lawn in a dilapidated section of 21st century Philadelphia. To pay for the divorce and provide schooling for Tal, Duffy must either sell the heap or, better, burn it down for the insurance.
The two burdens eventually converge when Tal enrolls at the Melange Center for Multiracial Life, a would-be “Mulattotopia” squatting at first in a city park but soon decamped to the grounds of the mansion. Hijinks and heartbreaks mount among a cast of mixed-race characters, including a giant blond Thor look-alike who has renamed himself “One Drop” after the infamous rule. Tal believes the mansion is haunted by the ghosts of the Lovings, the sacred First Couple of interracial marriage, whose successful 1967 lawsuit legalized interracial marriage nationally. Loving Day, the anniversary of the Supreme Court ruling, is celebrated at the Melange Center as “Mulatto Christmas.”
Like the Duffy family lawyer who is fluent in “Caucasian, street, and brotherman,” Johnson is especially acute on speech patterns, noticing a white clerk who “keeps his expression passive and servile” and concluding that we “have truly arrived in a new age.”
New age or not, the characters here can scarcely agree what to call themselves: Mixies, mixed race, redbone, halfro, biracial, triracial, mulatto, WASPafarian and, for epithets, the matched pair of Oreo and sunflower. None names a Team.
Gary Stonum is a critic and professor emeritus of English at Case Western Reserve University.
Do you remember being fifteen? Let Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson’s first adult novel 
by Charles Ellenbogen
There are 108 tally marks on the cover of 
Gail Arnoff received her B.A. from Western Reserve University and her M.A. from John Carroll University, where she currently teaches in the English Department. She also facilitates a seminar, “Questions of Identity,” in the SAGES program at Case Western Reserve University.
