New York, NY – Some 20 years ago, when novelist Alexander Chee was working for Out magazine, its owners commissioned a study of American book buying habits. The results: on average, lesbians bought 22 books each year, straight women, 14; gay men, 10; and straight men, one.

Although the data is outdated, there was a sense at the Center for Fiction that the portrait hasn’t changed that much. Critics and writers gathered for a panel on “Race, Gender, and Book Reviews” nodded in recognition.

With blue-chip reviewing outlets, said Hawa Allan, a lawyer, critic and contributing editor for Tricycle magazine, “the readership they imagine is not the readership that exists.” Noting the 2013 Pew Research study that found the most likely person to read a book was a college-educated black woman, Allan predicted that the legacy media offering book criticism will “adapt or die.”

Chee mentioned his disquiet with vocabulary, particularly the word “diversity.” It “expresses the problem in a hygienic way, when what it really means is fighting for your life.”

This ardor exists 180 degrees from some views posted to a story about the panel by Mark Rotella in Publishers Weekly.  “Great! More lunacy,” wrote Brad Carpenter of Rosemont College near Philadelphia. “Someone let me know when we go back to the idea of judging a book by it’s (sic) merit . . . not by the author’s skin color, political background, sexual orientation, gender, weight, height, ethnicity and what not.”

Indeed, Walton Muyumba, a critic and professor at Indiana University in Bloomington began the May 27 session with the question: “Does any of this matter?”

Miriam Markowitz, deputy book editor of the Nation, said, “If you think books matter then presumably you think writing about books matter.”  In December 2013, she wrote “Here Comes Everybody,” an influential examination of gender inequity in publishing.

Allan suggested that people at the margins often make the best critics, citing James Baldwin’s response to a television interviewer who asked him about the deep disadvantage of being poor, black and homosexual. “Oh no,” Baldwin said with a laugh, “I thought I hit the jackpot.”

Cate Marvin is a poet and co-founder of VIDA, the ground-breaking annual tally of whose book is reviewed in which magazines by gender, which served as the spine of Markowitz’ examination. “This is a thorny, slightly controversial but interesting conversation,” Marvin said, “especially to have in public, on the way we think about race and ethnicity and gender, sometimes together, sometimes not at all.”

Chee was more emphatic: “In my time on the planet, I’ve seen [book] criticism go from an august institution to something no one thinks they have to pay for and maybe everyone can do.  It matters enormously, especially with the decline of book criticism sections and the rise of book blogging. Believing it doesn’t matter is part of the problem.”

Markowitz pronounced her magazine’s own VIDA numbers “unfortunate,” and said two economies were at work: the material and the prestige.

Marvin said she has restructured her own curriculum choices as a professor of English at CUNY, based on what she learned with the VIDA count. “Curiosity is important and pressure is helpful,” she said. “I was slow to coming around, and I needed the pressure of the woman-of-color count.”

For his part, Muyumba described American culture as frankly misogynist and racist, which doesn’t mean there can’t be space for other perspectives. He recalled a moment in the class of Indiana University English Professor Susan Gubar, who co-wrote the seminal 1979 book of feminist criticism, Madwoman in the Attic:

“I sat there as a 20-year-old and she put books by women in front of me and said, ‘I dare you’ and I took that dare and it changed me radically.”  Or, as Allan put it, “If someone wants to read, they will read.”

A 200-page book on the untimely death of a spouse hardly seems like it would make for light summer reading. But as I’ve devoured Elizabeth Alexander‘s new memoir, The Light of The World, I’ve discovered that there’s beauty in loss, there’s sparkle in remembrance.

The poet lost her husband, painter and chef Ficre Ghebreyesus (pronounced Fee-kray Geb-reh-yess-oos) in April 2012, days after his 50th birthday. Their 15-year union produced two sons, Solomon and Simon, and a cozy life in Connecticut, where Alexander is a professor at Yale University. She composed “Praise Song for the Day” for President Obama’s 2009 inauguration; a year later she won the 2010 Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement prize.

Light does not begin with her husband’s passing, with Alexander preferring we get to know the man before we get to know the ghost. We get to peek into their daily courtship, the mundane aspects of a relationship—leaving for work, waiting up for a partner to get home—taking on a heightened importance. She paints a portrait of a man filled with pride for his Eritrean heritage and an extended family that spanned the globe. Still fresh from her loss, she decided to write this memoir to “fix him in place, to pass time in his company, to make sure I remember, even though I know I will never forget.”

Alexander insists that she knew she would marry her husband at first sight, confiding that she felt a “visceral torque” after laying eyes on her future beloved. But perhaps more powerfully, Alexander is able to show how much her husband loved her, how much of his life was dedicated to bringing light to hers.

Readers holding their breath for the details of Ghebreyesus’ death should know that it comes quickly. Here, the pain and uncertainty of death arrive fresh, even though we know what story we signed up to read. Alexander wrestles with the brutal unfairness of it all: “The slim one who eats oatmeal and flaxseed is the one who dies, while the plump one who eats bacon unabashed stays alive.”

Their story is overwhelmingly and achingly beautiful, with passages that elevate ho-hum Sunday dinners to love-drenched culinary affairs. (The inclusion of a few of Ghebreyesus’ best recipes only tease the senses; I’ve got my eye on the shrimp barka.) Their whole lives were art, from the music to the food to the telling of it all—it is a fitting tribute that one of her husband’s paintings adorns the cover.

“What are the odds that we would end up in the same place and fall in love?” she mused. “Once upon a time, halfway around the world, two women were pregnant at the same time in very different places and their children grew up and found each other.” What are the odds, indeed.

Marian Wright Edelman—born 75 years ago in small-town Bennettsville, S.C.—was named for the great contralto Marian Anderson. The founder of the Children’s Defense Fund still lifts up her voice.

During her third appearance at the City Club of Cleveland, Edelman peppered her talk with notions that seem boiled down over the decades:

• God did not make two classes of children.
• A nation that does not stand up for its children doesn’t stand for anything at all.
• I don’t know why we don’t do what we know.
• We don’t have a money problem. We have a morality problem.
• I want black kids and brown kids to see something in their future called college, not prison.

These were no bromides. Edelman bolstered them with withering facts, expressing her four-decade bewilderment that among the 35 richest nations, only Romania has a higher proportion of its children in poverty than the United States.  In 2013, 14.7 million American children—more than the population of Ohio—lived in official poverty while 6.5 million children faced the chronic hunger and homelessness of extreme poverty.

Then Edelman brought the numbers closer to home: In 2013 in Cleveland, 54 percent of its children are poor and one in four is extremely poor.  Some 4,000 students this academic year in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District were homeless or doubled-up in temporary housing, said Thomas Ott, director of assignments for the district’s news bureau.

“Let’s pray and vote and stand up and fight for those children who have never been carried,” Edelman said, echoing the Baptist tradition in which she grew up.

Wearing owlish glasses, a colorful green and yellow jacket and a no-nonsense air, the children’s crusader injected humor into her preaching, reaching for principles she said were derived from Noah’s Ark: “Remember the arc was built by amateurs and the Titanic was built by experts.”

To illustrate her message, Edelman described a young Clevelander she met last month in Columbus. Born addicted to drugs, Brittany defied a grim prognosis and grew into a student who loved and excelled in school, despite an absent father, a cocaine-addled mother and her own lupus.  For ten years Brittany’s grandmother provided a loving home for Brittany, her older sister and brother until their mother became sober and regained custody.  This spring, Brittany is graduating from John Hay High School of Science and Medicine determined to become a doctor.

“I believe so strongly we don’t have the right to give up on any child,” Edelman said, as some listeners wiped away tears.

Edelman acknowledged her long-time friends, Dolly and Steven A. Minter, for whom her City Club lecture was endowed.  Their daughter Robyn Minter Smyers, partner-in-charge of the Cleveland office of Thompson Hine, introduced Edelman, calling her “a role model and a profound source of inspiration.” Minter Smyers interned for Edelman in Washington, D.C. a quarter century ago.  A bit earlier, in 1970, another former Children Defense Fund intern began making her mark: Hillary Rodham.

Here are the remaining lessons Edelman derives from Noah’s Ark:

1. Don’t miss the boat. (The U.S. military now disqualifies 75 percent of applicants for illiteracy and prior imprisonment.)
2. We are all in the same boat.
3. Plan ahead. (“It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.”)
4. Stop being timid.
5. For safety, travel in pairs, or better yet, in community.

Did Marvel get it right with A-Force, its latest contribution to the world of female superheroes? Not if you ask Jill Lepore, Harvard University history professor and author of last year’s well-reviewed The Secret History of Wonder Woman. In a recent op-ed for The New Yorker, Lepore called the Avenger-type squad “porn stars.”

“Maybe it’s not possible to create reasonable female comic-book superheroes, since their origins are so tangled up with magazines for men,” writes Lepore, who won a 2006 Anisfield-Wolf prize for New York Burning. “True, they’re not much more ridiculous than male superheroes. But they’re all ridiculous in the same way.”

G. Willow Wilson, one of the creators of A-Force, responded on her Tumblr: “I imagine Dr. Lepore and I want the same thing: better, more nuanced portrayals of women in pop culture. What I don’t understand is why someone in her position would, from her perch a thousand feet up in the ivory tower, take pot shots at those of us who are in the trenches, doing exactly that.”

Wilson is a writer for the best-selling comic Ms. Marvel, which features a Muslim teen with shape-shifting powers, and she objected to the porn-star characterization head-on: “None of them are in the sexually objectified contortions that have become standard issue in recent decades. They are, in other words, posed the way their male colleagues are typically posed. They are posed as heroes.”

Read Lepore’s original cultural criticism in full here and see Wilson’s entire rebuttal.

Which black actors might best portray Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling and Dr. Robert Pershing Foster, the three real-life protagonists of Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking history of the Great Migration, “The Warmth of Other Sons”?

A-list producer Shonda Rhimes likely has her pick of talent in the small screen adaptation of Wilkerson’s meticulous nonfiction classic, which won a National Book Award and an Anisfield-Wolf prize in 2011.

Shondaland Productions will bring “Warmth” to FX this fall, her company’s first foray into cable programming. Writer/director Dee Rees of 2011’s indie hit Pariah will write the script.

Wilkerson, a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, spent 15 years researching the exodus of more than six million African Americans out of the South between 1910 and 1970. If the series sticks close to its source material, viewers will come to know Gladney, who left Mississippi in 1937 for Chicago; Starling, who fled Florida in 1945 for Harlem; and Foster, who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in 1953.

Wilkerson joins a long line of Anisfield-Wolf winners to have their works transitioned to screen; HBO has optioned both Marlon James’ 2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings and Ari Shavit’s 2013 My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. Better clear out room on the DVR.

More than 200 prominent authors—among them Anisfield-Wolf winners Junot Diaz and Kamila Shamsie—have publicly objected to the PEN American Center’s decision to present French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo its Free Expression Courage award.  Gunmen aggrieved by the magazine’s depiction of Islam targeted the controversial Paris weekly in January and killed a dozen people.

The signatories of an April letter to PEN argue that power and privilege must be considered when defining courageousness in satire: “The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.” One of the critics is former PEN American president Francine Prose.

Defending the decision, her successor, Andrew Solomon, co-wrote an op-ed for the New York Times, noting that, “Satire is often vulnerable to being construed as hate.” Solomon, who won a 2013 Anisfield-Wolf prize in nonfiction for “Far From the Tree,” expressed respect for those criticizing the award, but argues their emphasis is misplaced.

“I think that if we don’t endorse people who are taking these courageous stances,” Solomon told NPR, “if we don’t recognize the enormous personal risks they’re taking and if we don’t fully acknowledge that in taking that risk they keep a public discourse alive that otherwise is in danger of being entirely closed down, that we miss the purpose of standing up for free speech.”

Charlie Hebdo editor Gérard Biard is expected to accept the award on behalf of the magazine at PEN America’s annual gala in Manhattan May 5.

“I want to hear you say there should be peaceful protests, not violent protests, in the tradition of Martin Luther King,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer lectured community activist Deray McKesson in a now infamous four-minute interview.

“You are suggesting that broken windows are worse than broken spines,” McKesson answered, contrasting property damage with the injuries that killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore police custody.

Jericho Brown, winner of an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award this year, recoiled at Blitzer’s distortion of King and decided to say so. His essay, “How Not to Interview Black People About Police Brutality,” is posted on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog.

Minneapolis, MN — When the poet Ken Chen put together a discussion called “Mapping New Territories: Diasporic Writers from Regions of Conflict,” he knew the four artists he invited would be surprising in their range and moving in combination.

“The world is larger and more politicized than the regular American literary scene,” observed Chen, executive director of the New-York-based Asian American Writers Workshop.  His wry understatement served as coda to a powerful panel that attracted more than 120 listeners at the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference.

Begun in 1991, AAWW describes itself as “a safe community space and an anti-racist counterculture, incubating new ideas and interpretations of what it means to be both an American and a global citizen.”

Chen, whose book “Juvenilia” won the prestigious Yale Young Poets competition in 2009, opened the conversation with a nod to a 2012 volume that has been important to him: Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals who Remade Asia,” described by the author as “part historical essay and part intellectual biography.”

With this reference, Chen tilted his audience toward a way of thinking that might be coalitional and anti-imperialist, and might see a broad range of peoples—including Persian, Pacific Islander, Indian, Japanese and Chinese—”as a kind of political identity rather than a physical or biological identity.”

Panelist Hayan Charara, a born-in-Detroit son of Lebanese immigrants, described his poetry as 20 percent political and 80 percent deeply personal.  And yet, he is identified as a political poet, with such work as “Animals” and “Gaza” coming up first in Google searches. A recipient of a NEA grant in 2009, Charara is a professor at the University of Houston.

“One of the hardest tasks for an Arab to accomplish is to live non-politically,” Charara said in Minneapolis. He wrote: “The poems I submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts grew out of an enormous sense of helplessness over the ways my government—and the governments it supports—used and misused language toward violent ends. As a result, my grandfather died a victim of war, as did many family friends, old neighbors, and some animals. So while this award is especially meaningful, its irony is not lost on me.”

Oberlin College professor Kazim Ali described himself as “a yoga teacher and occasional poet who is interested in the body itself as a political instrument.” He spoke of leading eight-hour long yoga sessions over 10 days in Ramallah, Palestine, and training men from Arab villages “hungry for these yoga poses.” Although they ranged in age from 19-26, they were stiff, physically damaged by war, with “the bodies of 50-year-olds,” Ali said.

“It gave me a chance to work body by body,” he said. “It felt like a kind of physical activism.” It left Ali thinking about living without the ability to sleep, or move, constrained in a permanent disenfranchisement.

The poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs also spoke of her body in physical space.  The St. Olaf College professor was born in South Korea, taken from her mother and adopted into a white family in rural Oklahoma.  This experience meant “cleaving away from place and memory, of one’s own body being deracinated—adopted—into a white family.”

After a 13-year search, the poet was reunited with her Korean family and now advocates for the rights of unwed mothers and international adoptees. Her life, she said, has been one seeking “to demand a place on the ground, and to have that ground inside your mouth, if that makes sense. I think of territory as being inside my mouth. I am learning Korean.”

The visual artist, dancer, and poet Mong-Lan talked about her family of seven, which fled Saigon when she was a girl on the last day of its evacuation in 1975.  Her parents met in medical school and her father, a surgeon for the South Vietnamese Army, was dogged by post-traumatic stress. They eventually settled in Texas.

“In Vietnam, it’s called the American War,” said Mong-Lan, who returned as a Fulbright scholar in 2002 and again in 2007 to give a series of lectures at Vietnamese universities. “PTSD affects everyone in our family, including my brother’s children. It’s passed on for generations through the physical body.”

Mong-Lan, who now lives in Buenos Aires, echoed Ali, suggesting some of the answer might lie in movement itself. For writers from war-torn regions, “trauma gets relocated to another site: and that site is often the body,” Chen said.

The cable network renowned for ambitious storytelling has optioned the rights to Marlon James’ latest novel, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award this year in fiction.  The book paints a complex portrait of Jamaica, hinged on the1976 assassination attempt on reggae legend Bob Marley and told in more than 30 distinct narrative voices.

James will adopt the script along with Eric Roth, who won an Academy Award in 1994 for the screenplay of “Forrest Gump.” No premiere date has been released.

James, an English professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., will take a yearlong sabbatical to concentrate on the adaptation. He told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that transitioning his work to the small screen represents an opportunity for more character exposition.

“There are some characters in the book who are minor who I’d love to dig into in a bigger way,” he said. “And I know that Jamaica may be wary that the main character, Josey Wales, is a gangster, a bad man. But you can look to New Jersey to see how they deal with ‘The Sopranos.’ They don’t take pride in the criminality, but they look at the show and say, this [setting] is a place of deep, meaningful stories.”

by Maria Pineda

For centuries, Christians have stereotyped Muslims and I, for most of my 17 years, have stereotyped them too, especially after 9/11. I am a senior of Saint Martin De Porres High School and I grew up with Islamophobia, fear of people who practice Islam.  But this year I was assigned a capstone project that I focused on Muslim life in America, because I was curious about this group that frightened me. I had believed some of the most heinous stereotypes: that Muslim men beat their wives and that all Muslims were dangerous. To me, the headscarves worn by some Islamic women looked suspicious.

A year of research upended my attitudes about Islam. Now, I am offended when someone speaks ignorantly about it.  During a recent Spanish class, my teacher went over some history of Spain, noting that Muslims controlled the territory we now call Spain from 771 to 1130, and were part of a religiously mixed culture on the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. But my teacher also stated that Muslims worship Muhammad, which irritated me because I knew Muslims worship only Allah, and Muhammad is their prophet. I immediately raised my hand and told my teacher what I knew was right. To his credit, he acknowledged his mistake. I found that setting the record straight was as important to me as it would have been had my own faith been mischaracterized.

As part of my research, I interviewed Julia Shearson, a Muslim convert and executive director of the Cleveland chapter of Council on American-Islamic Relations.  She taught me a good deal about Islam, carefully explaining the meaning of Jihad, Sharia Law, and the purpose of the head scarf that some Muslim women wear.  Shearson confided that people sometimes fear her when they glimpse her headscarf.  A stranger once jumped away from her as she exited an elevator.  That left me speechless—I have rarely met a nicer person, but such incidents show how deep our stereotypes can be.

I have become a passionate ally of the religion and I intend to continue to defend it.  When a newscaster reporting on ISIS refers to its members as “Jihadists,” I get angry—Jihad refers to the deep struggle of life. I had the same reaction when I heard about people in Nashville protesting against the construction of a mosque, assuming its members would plot against America and try to substitute Sharia Law for the U.S. Constitution. Discrimination like this is so offensive to all law-abiding followers of Islam.

Now I know many American Muslims struggle in our country to find a job or housing. Women who wear scarves to respect their modesty have lost opportunities and faced prejudice because of their faith. This is such an unnecessary sacrifice in 2015.

I am grateful to have researched the stereotyping of Muslims in America, and in my own mind. I hope to contribute to a cycle of enlightenment and liberation so the misconceptions and discrimination against Muslims will diminish over my lifetime, along with other prejudices in our communities.

Maria Pineda is a senior at Saint Martin de Porres High School.

“It’s not profound regret,” she told NPR’s Terry Gross. “It’s just a wiping up of tiny little messes that you didn’t recognize as mess when they were going on.”

In a warm lecture hall, University of Kentucky professor Adam Banks bounced and spoke with the cool cadence of a spoken-word poet, dropping gems on technology, funk and black freedom.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Banks returned to the city to argue that Stevie Wonder’s 1972 album, “Talking Book,” is a master key to black rhetoric, literacy, innovation and contemporary engagements with technology. As he stood on the campus of Case Western Reserve University, blocks from the John Hay High School he attended as a teen, Banks seemed keenly aware of geography and beginnings as he performed his presentation: “Talking Back to the Book: Critical Digital Literacies in African American Rhetorical Traditions.”

He called Wonder’s work “a funk sermon,” an infusion of new technologies, innovation and cultural pride. Funk music, he insisted, gives African Americans a framework for assessing our identities. “The boldness, the wildness, the stank of funk forces us to remember the full range of who we be, and often, forces the rest of the society to confront more of that range, that rage, that joy, that pain, that pleasure of who we be.”

Bridging the gap between the civil rights era and the black power era, “Talking Book” came out at a time when “black communities all over the country were refiguring their relationship with the United States,” Banks said.

Linking Wonder and other masters of funk to today’s rhetorical spaces, Banks described Facebook and Instagram as places where creativity and free dialogue can flourish, as it did among musicians in a studio. “That’s an example of a free space,” he observed. “It can’t be policed.”

Such places contrast with the “incessant testing, punitive mind-set and folk funding the de-funding of public education” that bedevil American schools today. And those free spaces, existing outside traditional academic environments, can be created and expanded almost anywhere. For years, Banks has hosted “community cyphers” in bars and church basements, giving lessons on blogging and social media so participants could develop a voice on their own terms. Whether using Twitter to support the #BlackLivesMatter movement or simply retweeting humorous memes, these acts link to black oral traditions such as hush harbors and “signifying.”

“There’s a relationship between innovation and tradition,” Banks insisted. “Just because there’s a lot of wild stuff happening right now, doesn’t mean it just grew. It comes from somewhere….that’s a wonderful assurance. Even if I don’t understand some things that are happening, that’s always a way in.”

The Cleveland Foundation today announced the winners of its 80th Annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. The 2015 recipients of the only national juried prize for literature that confronts racism and examines diversity are:

• Jericho Brown, The New Testament, Poetry
• Marilyn Chin, Hard Love Province, Poetry
• David Brion Davis, Lifetime Achievement
• Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, Nonfiction
• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, Fiction

“The new Anisfield-Wolf winners heighten our perceptions on race and diversity,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who chairs the jury. “This year, we honor ground-breaking research into the lives of specific families enslaved on two New World plantations, a tour-de-force fictional portrayal of Jamaica spun in multiple voices, poetry from both coasts that is erotic and grave, and the indispensable, morally towering scholarship of David Brion Davis.”

Gates directs the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University, where he is also the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. He praised David Brion Davis as a foundational scholar whose Problem of Slavery trilogy is an essential work on the cultural, political and intellectual history of Western slavery and abolition. Joining Gates in selecting the winners each year are poet Rita Dove, novelist Joyce Carol Oates, psychologist Steven Pinker and historian Simon Schama.

Cleveland Foundation President and Chief Executive Officer Ronn Richard said the breadth of topics taken up by this year’s winners is gratifying, and reflects founder and donor Edith Anisfield Wolf’s belief in the power of the written word to elevate and enlighten.

“The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards rose from the philanthropic vision of one woman who realized that literature could advance our thinking and beliefs about race, culture, ethnicity, and our shared humanity,” Richard said. “We are proud to showcase books that are beautifully written and enhance the urgent, national – and local – conversations around race and cultural difference.”

Past winners include four writers who went on to win Nobel prizes – Nadine Gordimer, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison and Wole Soyinka.

Meet Our 2015 Winners

 Jericho Brown, The New Testament, Poetry 

In the language of the blues and the Bible, poet Jericho Brown crafts 40 poems for The New Testament, a meditation on race, masculinity and gay sexuality. Anisfield Wolf juror Rita Dove calls this book “a reminder that outrage is a seductive disease — we would rather rage or weep than find a way to love in spite of the pain. Brown’s poems brim with love for this damaged world without letting the world off the hook.” And poet Rae Armantrout adds her praise, noting: “Like the other new testament, it’s about what love can do.” Brown teaches creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Marilyn Chin, Hard Love Province, Poetry

Hard Love Province is the fourth collection of poetry from Marilyn Chin, whose book mourns the loss of a beloved in a world that seems inured to suffering. “In these sad and beautiful poems, a withering portrayal of our global ‘society’ emerges – from Buddha to Allah, Mongols to Bethesda boys, Humvee to war horse, Dachau to West Darfu, Irrawaddy River to San Diego,” observes Dove. Among the 23 poems are One Child Has Brown Eyes and Black President. Adrienne Rich described Chin’s work as “powerful, uncompromised and unerring.” Born in Hong Kong, Chin is a professor at San Diego State University.

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings, Fiction

In scalding yet musical language, A Brief History of Seven Killings hinges on the true 1976 attempt to assassinate reggae legend Bob Marley. Novelist Marlon James just calls him The Singer, and sets this character among a pinwheel of voices: CIA agents, child gangsters, a Rolling Stone reporter, drug dealers, corrupt politicians and a woman seriously diverted by one night with the musician. Anisfield-Wolf juror Joyce Carol Oates praised the “superb risk-taking” of James, whose story brims with profanity, violence, dialect, tenderness and cruelty. James teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

 Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia, Nonfiction

More than 40 years in the making, A Tale of Two Plantations is a scrupulous, revelatory archival investigation of some 2,000 people enslaved across three generations: roughly half on a Jamaican sugar plantation called Mesopotamia, and half on Mount Airy, a Virginia tidewater plantation growing tobacco and grain. Richard S. Dunn, a University of Pennsylvania historian, uses his findings to ask about enslaved motherhood, the effects of interracial sex on the meaning of family and how individuals fared upon emancipation. Oates calls the book magisterial, noting, “It is refreshing to encounter a historian who doesn’t include a forced conclusion.”

 David Brion Davis, Lifetime Achievement

David Brion Davis is a preeminent American historian whose 1967 book, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, earned an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. It anchors a groundbreaking trilogy that culminated last year in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, which in March won the National Book Critics Circle award. Harvard University President Drew Gilpin writes that Davis’ influence is deep, having changed “traditional approaches to intellectual history by embedding ideas in social and political action and institutions.” Born in Denver in 1927, Davis is an Army veteran who retired from Yale University in 2001. He lives in Connecticut.

Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow Lisa Nielson had the honor of introducing Chang-Rae Lee to the packed audience at the 2015 Writers Center Stage series, sponsored by the Cuyahoga County Public Library and Case Western Reserve University. Her remarks, reprinted here, remind us why these conversations—about strong books and the authors that birth them—matter. 

by Lisa Nielson 

Cleveland has a long history of celebrating literature and the arts. As many of you know, we are the home of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, now about to celebrate her 80th year, which is one of the most important and inspiring book awards in the country. They were started by Cleveland philanthropist and poet Edith Anisfield Wolf in 1935 to honor books focused on what was then called “race relations.” Today, the list reflects an awe-inspiring array of thinking and scholarship on human diversity, including ground-breaking studies on slavery in the US, racism and genocide, neurodiversity and disability, immigrant experiences and global diasporas.

Each September, I ride downtown with my students on the Healthline to attend the awards ceremony. Sharing the evening with them is one of the highpoints of my year. My students have a great time and are also unanimous that the food is excellent. I mention this because this year we have had the pleasure of having two past winners of the Anisfield-Wolf Book awards grace our campus: Zadie Smith last September and this evening, Dr. Chang-rae Lee.

Doing justice to Dr. Lee’s amazing career in a few minutes is impossible, so I’ll mention just some of his many accomplishments. He was born in Seoul, Korea, and moved with his family to the US as a young child. After receiving his BA in English from Yale, Dr. Lee found a job working as an equities analyst, but continued to write. He went on to earn an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon, where he was later hired as an assistant professor. He then ran and taught in the MFA program at Hunter College in NYC. Since 2002, Dr. Lee has been a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. Dr. Lee has written five, highly-acclaimed novels, as well as short stories and articles for the New Yorker, New York Times, Granta, and many other prominent publications in the US and abroad.

His first novel, Native Speaker (1995) won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Best First Novel, the American Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and an ALA Notable Book of the Year Award. In 1999, the New Yorker listed him as one of the 20 best American writers under 40. His second novel, A Gesture Life (1999), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction in 2000, and The Surrendered (2010) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. Dr. Lee’s most recent novel, On Such a Full Sea, published in 2014, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction.

To me, reading his work is a full sensorial immersion. His writing is gorgeous, elegant, sensuous, and often funny. Dr. Lee’s novels address fundamental questions about the nature and composition of identity and cultural assimilation. Yet, his definitions of identity are not limited to ethnicity, gender, language, social class, or other academic categories, but how these aspects of our selves intersect with each other, the choices we make and our communities. He defies genre labels by writing in different vernaculars and slipping into the skins of men and women of all ages and backgrounds. Using the canvas of recent history, such as the Korean War, the abuses of comfort women by the Japanese during WWII, the experiences and assimilation of new Americans, Dr. Lee invites the reader into what Gloria Anzaldua called the borderlands; breaking us out of our hyphenated binaries and assumptions that identity is forever fixed.

In each novel, Lee places us – sometimes gently, sometimes not – on the path of a journey-in-progress. We are tossed into the deep end of life where we bump up against those swimmers we encounter as we move from one body of experience to the next. While on the way, we realize that although our complex human identities may include important components such as ethnicity, gender, or privilege, it is our relationship to others that gives meaning and definition to our ever-changing selves. This odyssey is perhaps most fully realized in Dr. Lee’s most recent novel, On Such a Full Sea, which is a futuristic imagining of the world following environmental disaster. In it, we follow the journey of Fan, who is part of a colony of workers originally transported from Asia to grow vegetables and fish in what is now called “B-Mor”, the former Baltimore, for the wealthy elites of the Charters. She is a skilled diver who immerses herself in the rough world as she seeks her lost lover, Reg, who has been stolen because he is C(ancer)-free. The fact of her journey causes her home community to rebel against the carefully padded limitations they have been surrounded by, and she fundamentally changes the people who encounter her.

Through Fan, Henry Park of Native Speaker, Doc Hata in A Gesture Life, Hector and June in The Surrendered, we are reminded that all of us swim together, immersed in the world; and that the ripples we cause as we move forward lap unavoidably against those of the people we encounter along the way. When we dive deep, we find we are all capable of changing and being changed.

Lisa Nielson is the Anisfield-Wolf SAGES Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. She has a PhD in historical musicology, with a specialization in Women’s Studies, and teaches seminars on the harem, slavery and courtesans.

by Sarah Marcus

Like many of my days spent teaching, today feels hard, but important. By 10 a.m. I’ve already had some awesome, small victories. A student ran upstairs 10 minutes before class to make sure that he understood what the word “vixen” meant and wanted to discuss if he could use it in a feminist context within his “Be A Man” poem. He told me that this felt like the biggest and most important question that he had all year. He caught the bus early so that he could be at school early to talk to me about it.

The “Be A Man/Woman” poem assignment originated from a powerful in-class discussion that we had about gender and masculinity. In my 12th Grade Creative Writing Class, largely due to the influence and materials of one of my incredible mentors, Daniel Gray Kontar, we have recently been examining Feminism and Hip-Hop. We are learning to identify poetic and literary devices through the analysis of classical poets and Hip-Hop poets. We are looking at the larger conversation that occurs in R&B music amongst emcees. We looked at ’80s and ’90s hip-hop feminists and we are now looking at and discussing the feminism and anti-feminism of Nicki Minaj. We are talking about objectification and authoring our own identities. We are talking about the double standards and negative connotations that come with women “acting like men” and vice versa. We began this unit by watching the documentary film MissRepresentation in order to provide context about how gender is portrayed in the media.

During one of our discussions about gender expectations and slut shaming, one of my senior girls says, “A master key is a key that can open any lock. That’s how we treat boys having sex. But, a lock that can be opened by any key is a bad lock. That’s how people look at girls.” Brilliant. Devastating.

We watch an interview with Nicki Minaj where she talks about how a man is a boss and a woman is a bitch when they try and get things done. We want to know what it means to be a successful businessman/woman. Some of my students have deeply held and extremely traditional beliefs about gender roles. We talk about how that is OK, if that’s what both people in a relationship want. We talk about how feminism means that you get to choose. We talk about consent.

My students, for the most part, are pretty invested. They are also super insightful. They are becoming educated consumers. I get emails and texts at all hours of the day and night with video clips or pictures that involve pop-culture that addresses feminist themes. As a teacher, this fills my heart with joy.

One day, we began a class with a short video from the #VogueEmpower Campaign to #StartWithTheBoys called “Boys Don’t Cry.”

During our follow up discussion, one of my girls says, “I would want my husband to tell my son to stop crying. I don’t want no sissy son. My daddy hit my mom because his daddy hit his mom. Not because someone told him not to cry or to stop acting like a girl.” I think being a good teacher means that everyone feels safe in your classroom, even when comments make your stomach turn. Everyone’s voice must be respected and valued. Everyone comes from different experiences. To model this care is what allows students to explore and challenge each other in a moderated space. So, I try to respond with the love and tolerance that I desperately want them to show each other. I say, “That’s a really interesting point. It makes sense to me that the act of simply telling a boy not to cry doesn’t necessarily make him into an abuser. Do you think that was the message in this video?”

We talk about life cycles. About what happens when we are not allowed to have or express emotion? What happens when we are punished for our emotions? How many people have ever bottled up their emotions and then it all came out at once in an angry explosion, raise your hand? All hands go up. I relate, too.

One student is deeply is offended by the video. “I would never do that,” he says, “That’s not fair.” I give them a brief history of #NotAllMen and then I give a race analogy. What does it mean to say, I wouldn’t say racist things, so the problem of racism doesn’t apply to me? What is our responsibility as humans? As advocates? What does it mean to say that you don’t see race, or that in your personal experience, that’s not how racism works? What is the danger in that narrow perspective? How does it perpetuate racism? Rape culture? We begin to scratch the surface of intersectionality.

We spend another class talking about whether there is such a thing as a “real” man or a “real” woman. Is “real” just our way of separating out how some people use their actions, beliefs, and attitudes to help others and some people use them to hurt others?

These themes are interwoven with videos like Buzzfeed’s #BlackLivesMatter “Things Black Men Are Tired of Hearing.”

One student responds:

Everyone wants to be black; everyone doesn’t want to be black. People want to be black when it benefits them. They try and show so much pride in them when we get a black president. They don’t want to show up for the million man march the next day. It’s not a choice to be black, it’s your life. You have to choose. To you what does that mean? Are you the thug on the street with a gun at your side dealing drugs or are you in school getting your education?

I love these kids. I really love them. I don’t need them to think like me, but I do need them to feel challenged to think deeply. They challenge me, too. Most of my students still want to know when I’m going to stop “holding [his abusive actions] over Chris Brown’s head, because he’s apologized like a million times, Ms. Marcus!”

One of my students aptly points out that if you are conditioned to have no emotion, if you are programmed that way, it isn’t possible to believe that other people have emotions. It’s not possible in this scenario to have empathy, because you feel nothing.

I talk about the importance of empathy and being sensitive and expressing emotion… how I personally believe that expressing emotion and the ability to be sensitive and empathetic is healthy and helps us act loving and tolerant towards one another. I say that true strength comes with showing people care and forgiveness.

The boy sitting next to me says emphatically, “But, Ms. Marcus! Isn’t your boyfriend a bodybuilder!?”

And I say, “Yes, he is! This is an excellent point.” I talk about the stereotypes I had in my head about what I thought it meant to be bodybuilder before we met. I told them about the assumptions that I made about how I thought that my partner must have defined masculinity based on my assessment of his social media pages. I told them that I almost didn’t give him a chance. How I thought he was a hyper-masculine “bro.” After all, how smart could you be if you cared so much about muscles? Bodybuilders (in my mind) were self-absorbed, obsessed chauvinists with a one-track mind. Unfair? Extremely. I thought that he had a whole lot of dudes drinking out of red cups in his pictures… He had a lot of memes about #squatting and #fitgirls… oy vey, I thought. No thanks.

But, throughout our correspondences he was smart and witty and thoughtful and attentive. He read all of my online articles and was able to make intelligent comments about them. My partner, like many men I’ve met in their late 20s, didn’t identify as a feminist (despite being one) until he met me. Today, he is an incredible and visible ally and advocate. I tell my students that he is the kindest, most compassionate, sensitive, chivalrous and emotionally advanced man I have ever met, and we get to talk about how a man can be all of those things. I tell my partner about our class discussion and he writes a beautiful, thoughtful response to the kids about what masculinity means to him. This is how “Be A Man/Be A Woman” poems happened. I knew we needed to creatively process these discussions.

In regards to this morning, another one of my senior boys wrote a truly powerful poem about masculinity and orchestrated opportunities for audience participation. He even came to me after school last week to discuss my partner’s response to what it means to “be a man.” We went paragraph by paragraph. He was so interested in how someone could identify as both a very “masculine” bodybuilder and also as a feminist. This is a student who turns in no work and is constantly on the verge of being kicked out. I wrote a positive letter home, and when I went to put it in his file, I saw a long list of notes home about failing classes. This was his first positive home contact and he has been here for four years. Another one of my male (cis) seniors wrote a poem from the perspective of a young gay man. Kind of groundbreaking, right?

I was so invigorated by these wins. These dedicated and brave students. Then, I open my email from our school social worker to read that another one of my freshmen girls lost a family member to a fatal drive-by shooting. These types of emails are not uncommon. Recently, another one of my senior boys lost four family members in a brutal home murder. Sometimes it feels like you are doing so much, and then you realize that you are doing so little. These kids live in a reality riddled with violence that most of us can’t possibly begin to understand. I learn from their strength and fortitude. I try to grow from it. I am humbled and blessed to be able to do this job. So, when I feel like I’m having a tough day because my body hurts due to a slew of not fun health issues, I think about how my day isn’t actually tough at all. It’s all about my perspective and attitude. It’s never going to be as hard for me as it is for them. That’s why I teach. Because everyone deserves a chance. These kids, especially. I want them to have the tools to change the narrative. They are brave and they are empowered to author their own identities. Our actions matter. Teachers matter. Students matter. I want them to have a voice, to know their voice, and to use their voice.

Republished with permission by the author. 

Sarah Marcus is the author of BACKCOUNTRY (2013, Finishing Line Press) and Every Bird, To You (2013, Crisis Chronicles Press). Her other work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s, Cimarron Review, CALYX Journal, Spork, Nashville Review, Slipstream, Tidal Basin Review, and Bodega, among others. She is an editor at Gazing Grain Press and a spirited Count Coordinator for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She holds an MFA in poetry from George Mason University and currently teaches and writes in Cleveland, OH.

Bryan Stevenson needs no notes.

Not for his TED Talk, not for his Daily Show appearance, and not for his 40 minutes on stage in Cleveland.

Some 800 people made reservations to hear him—so many that his host, Facing History and Ourselves, moved the event to a larger auditorium at Cleveland State University. As Stevenson entered, the assembly was on its feet, prompting Felton Thomas, executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, to raise his eyebrows: “A standing ovation before he even speaks?”

The bald, soft-spoken lawyer—who wore the same suit and tie as he did for Jon Stewart—promised “we can create greater justice in Cleveland” and offered four organizing principles to accomplish this. But he began with bad news: “We are in a very, very different place in this country than we were 40 years ago, a more discouraging place. In 1972, 300,000 people were behind bars; the prison population is 3.2 million now with six million on probation. There are 68 million Americans with criminal arrests.”

One in three black boys born today is expected to go to jail—a blistering rate of incarceration unseen in the 19th or 20th centuries. In Alabama, where Stevenson has spent 30 years fighting the death penalty and overseeing the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote.

“If we are to create more justice, we have to reposition ourselves,” Stevenson said. “We must get closer to the places—the schools, the city neighborhoods, the jails—where there is injustice. Distance will create bad outcomes.” This lesson arrives on page 14 of Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, “Just Mercy,” and comes from his formidable grandmother, whose own parents were enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia.

This bit resonated particularly for Mark Swain-Fox, executive director of the Cleveland offices of Facing History: “I haven’t read a book in the last decade that had the same impact on me.”

Smiling slightly and often, the author mined many of the book’s anecdotes, collapsed into a presentation that both inspired and challenged. Before he finished law school, Stevenson interviewed a shackled, death-row inmate, and the encounter altered his life’s course. “Proximity,” he said, “has this way of waking up things in you that you didn’t know were asleep.”

The second proviso is to change the racial narrative in our heads. Stevenson called on his listeners to see that the story that labeled children—mostly black and brown boys—as super-predators led to unjust sentences and horrific outcomes. “The narrative has to change about race,” he said. “We have been contaminated, all of us, by the silence that surrounds racial inequality.”

Because there was no equivalent to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the United States, America has slipped from slavery to lynching and terrorism to Jim Crow to mass incarceration without confronting the legacy. “The great evil of slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude,” Stevenson said, “it was the notion of white supremacy.”

Stevenson, 55, said his parents were humiliated every day of their lives by this falsehood. The collective, happy sense that civil rights got accomplished in three metaphorical days—Rosa Parks sat down, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched, and voting rights laws passed— ignores the lived experience of black folk, and the mass incarceration of today.

The third prong of creating more social justice, Stevenson said, is protecting one’s hopefulness. He told a story of seeing an Alabama truck festooned with Confederate flags and a bumper sticker that read “If I’d have known it would be like this, I would have picked my own cotton.”

The truck belonged to a prison guard who harassed and strip-searched Stevenson before he could visit a client. The law professor felt hopeless when he returned and spotted the same truck in the prison parking lot. But the hostile guard had sat in the back of the courtroom during Stevenson’s oral arguments defending a cognitively diminished man, and, because of his own experiences in foster care, saw the situation differently. The man greeted Stevenson, asked to shake his hand, and admitted having gone out of his way to bring the impaired prisoner a milkshake.

The fourth, and most difficult requirement, is finding the courage to make oneself uncomfortable. “Why do we want to kill all the broken people?” Stevenson asked, listing those broken by poverty, racism, neglect, despair and disability. He said he has come to understand himself as broken, and to embrace those most reviled in society as his community.

Stevenson said he understood being the victim of serious crime; his own grandfather was killed when Stevenson was 16. But he wants more than retribution. He wants what Portugal has started, a wholesale route to rehabilitation for addicts. And a legal system that doesn’t assume—as the Chicago judge did when he mistook Stevenson as a defendant—that black is criminal and dangerous.

Famed dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison warned a recent audience that she has a tendency to ramble: “I will be reading my remarks. Otherwise I’ll be totally scattered. It’s kind of like when I dance.”

Over 40 minutes at Baldwin Wallace University near Cleveland, Jamison still strayed, but her colorful asides drew an intimate portrait of 50 years with the storied Alvin Ailey American Dance Company. Elegant in a sleek black shirt and pants, covered with a multicolored shawl, she sauntered from point to point, at ease in front of a near-capacity crowd.

Jamison, 71, joined the company in 1965 at the request of Alvin Ailey himself, who founded the dance troupe out of frustration over the lack of opportunity for black dancers. She marveled at Ailey’s physicality: “He moved his whole body like liquid. No one moved like him.” She danced and choreographed with him for more than 20 years, then became artistic director after Ailey’s 1989 death. She stayed until 2011 and remains on the board as artistic director emerita.

Born in Philadelphia on the precipice of the Civil Rights movement, Jamison told her audience that she was drawn to Ailey because of the way he saw the arts as fundamental in the struggle for equality.

“When Dr. King said, ‘We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence…Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force,’ our soul force was our performance,” Jamison said. “And our dancing was our protest. Alvin Ailey wanted a company that would explore the black cultural experience. He wanted to show our beauty, our dignity, our passion using the powerful language of dance theater.”

Her life was defined by those lessons of race and dignity, she said, beginning as a six-year-old student of pioneering dance instructor Marion Cuyjet. As an African-American woman with green eyes, light skin and red hair, Cuyjet used her ability to “pass” to teach young black children who would otherwise be barred from formal instruction.

Cuyjet, Jamison said, was evicted from seven studios, but the teacher never let institutional racism stop her. Watching her instructor repeatedly shift facilities taught Jamison an important lesson: “You have to make your own door when the door won’t open. Make your own frame and walk through the door you created.”

Jamison’s parents nurtured her artistry and encouraged both their children to savor life. “We didn’t have a whole lot of money, but they made things accessible,” she said. “The root of my artistic and cultural life comes from being taken to operas, concerts, theater, and from hearing my father’s calloused fingers play a Rachmaninoff sonata.”

The pioneering dancer’s tone warmed as she shared her desire to spread the power of the arts to youth in the same ways her parents did—by exposing them early and watching them find their doorways. “I enjoy seeing young people entering the theater as individuals, and leaving as part of a community,” she said, beaming wide. “That’s how the arts are supposed to make you feel.”