Archive - History of Black Writing Blog

Florence Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta was born July 21, 1944 in Lagos, Nigeria, to Igbo parents, Jeremy and Alice Nwabudinke. Her childhood was spent in Ibusa, the birthplace of her parents. In the 1950s she met her future husband Sylvester Onwordi. Between 1960 through 1966, the young couple bore five kids, two boys and three girls. Emecheta and her husband raised their family in London.

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Continuing our celebration of “hidden figures” in Kansas, Dr. Maryemma Graham sat down with Mrs. Ann B. Garvin to discuss her lifelong commitment to education and advocacy for women, children and youth.

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Either indirectly or directly, all of you are responsible for creating the political climate that encouraged American citizens, with the help of the Electoral College, to elect President Trump. In the spirit of trying to perpetuate a liberal democracy , citizens voted. A number of feel cheated. We have been cheated as the MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN mantra resounds throughout the United States. In this Republic, which can be little more than a metaphor for democracy, we are dismayed that the number of popular votes for a candidate counts for naught. We shall continue to vote, especially in local and state elections. Mark my words. Some of you may wish to apply for one of the jobs your President has vowed to bring back to America. The grapes of wrath shall bloom. Some of you shall lose your seats. ..

Mass media and social media do seem to serve the purposes of the Trump administration well. Despite its commitment to inform the public, mass media use half-truths and lies to frustrate the process of thinking in the United States of America. Its agencies profit from the enterprise. Its agents take delight in toying with issues and ideas, providing scant evidence one might use to make judgments. They perform scripts and entertain; they do not tax themselves to specify frames of reference. The audience is saturated with whatever can be easily improvised.

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Famed Chicago Defender photographer Robert “Bobby” Sengstacke passed away March 7, 2017. His photos of Black life and culture are widely revered, collected, and published.

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Usually seeds aren’t planted into the ground in the stubborn cold of February. But what other month could capture such seeds as the ones that our dear friend Jerrie planted in her lifetime. For February stands out not only for the shared history that we commemorate but the campaign of Black books that Jerrie so awesomely pushed.

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This interview is part of Black Poetry of the Black Arts Movement, an institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and under the auspices of Project on the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas. Webinar with poet Sharan Strange conducted October 28, 2015.

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The single word in the beginning of Ginsberg’s semi-autobiographical, derivative tribute to Walt Whitman that captures attention is “minds,” although the current visibility  of mental illness and homelessness in the USA might derail that focus...

A metronome does not measure the pleasure of reading a long poem. The pleasure exists, outside of time, in a reader’s total aesthetic experience of bringing something to the poem and taking away much more than she or he arrived with. Only strong readers survive, and some of them opt to transform knowledge gained into actions. Others hoard their intellectual wealth. In American time-and-capital-driven cultures of reading, one might argue that becoming a strong reader is often a luxury enjoyed mainly by the incarcerated, for they are condemned to live in “abnormal” time. While they may open their readings to the sufferings of history, they do so without the Kabbalistic gestures Harold Bloom ascribes to strong readers in A Map of Misreading(1975). They employ fierce independence and common sense.

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