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Relating his fatherless childhood in inner-city Los Angeles, a poet and journalist describes his yearning, and that of other African American men, to escape this destructive cycle to achieve personal security and happiness.
Animating Black and Brown Liberation introduces a vital new tool for reading American literatures. Rooted in both ancient Egyptian ideas about life and cutting-edge theories of animacy, or levels of aliveness, this tool—ankhing—enables Michael Datcher to examine the ways African American and Latinx literatures respond to and ultimately work to resist hegemonic forces of neoliberalism and state-sponsored oppression. Weaving together close readings and politically informed philosophical reflection, Datcher considers the work of writer-activists Toni Cade Bambara, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Salvador Plascencia, and Ishmael Reed, in light of theoretical interventions by ...
This New York Times–bestselling memoir about an African American man’s struggles and triumphs is “heartrending and beautiful” (Junot Diaz Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao). A Today Show Book Club selection, Raising Fences tells the story of a man whose youth was spent committing petty crimes, experimenting with sex, and developing a mortal fear of police. Like many young black men, Michael Datcher’s childhood was marked by the gaping hole left by an absent father. Out of that absence grew the desire to fulfill a dream that seemed almost a fantasy: to leave the streets behind, build a family, and become what he had wanted so badly—a good fath...
A timely and profound anthology from the national bestselling author of Black, White and Jewish, Representing a stunning range of essayists and novelists, both men and women, this groundbreaking anthology boldly confronts the complications, possibilities, uncertainties, and joys of being a man in the 21st century.
The impact of absent fathers on sons in the black community has been a subject for cultural critics and sociologists who often deal in anonymous data. Yet many of those sons have themselves addressed the issue in autobiographical works that form the core of African American literature. A Fatherless Child examines the impact of fatherlessness on racial and gender identity formation as seen in black men’s autobiographies and in other constructions of black fatherhood in fiction. Through these works, Tara T. Green investigates what comes of abandonment by a father and loss of a role model by probing a son’s understanding of his father’s struggles to define himself and the role of communit...
One hundred years from now, and against all the odds, Earth has found a new stability; the political order has reached some sort of balance, and the new colony on Mars is growing. But the fraught years of the 21st century have left an uneasy legacy ... Genetically engineered alpha males, designed to fight the century's wars have no wars to fight and are surplus to requirements. And a man bred and designed to fight is a dangerous man to have around in peacetime. Many of them have left for Mars but now one has come back and killed everyone else on the shuttle he returned in. Only one man, a genengineered ex-soldier himself, can hunt him down and so begins a frenetic man-hunt and a battle survival. And a search for the truth about what was really done with the world's last soldiers. BLACK MAN is an unstoppable SF thriller but it is also a novel about predjudice, about the ramifications of playing with our genetic blue-print. It is about our capacity for violence but more worrying, our capacity for deceit and corruption. This is another landmark of modern SF from one of its most exciting and commercial authors.
Winner of the Harper Lee Award (2018) Fierce and sensual, the poems in Outlandish Blues merge everyday speech with a shimmering lyricism and burst from the page into song. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers sees the blues, what she terms the "shared 'blue notes,''' as an important intersection between the secular and the divine, and between the various African American vernacular traditions, from spirituals to jazz. Part Nina Simone, part Bessie Smith, her poems are filled with a sweaty honesty, moving from the personal to the collective experience. This movement is often accomplished through the use of personae, concentrated here in a stunning series of poems on the Biblical figures of Hagar and Sarah. Whether about a contemporary domestic scene, a slave ship, or Aretha Franklin, these are poems that speak to the soul of experience.
Thirty-seven Los Angeles authors contribute stories, poems and essays about contemporary LA.
This anthology begins with the memory of landscapes and landmarks, presenting poems in the For My People tradition of Margaret Walker. It includes a section titled "Blood and Disappointment in the Land," which documents ongoing social struggles. Other poems focus on the love that is essential for survival, rebirth, and dreams. More than 100 prominent African American poets contribute, including the distinguished and award-winning poets Toi Derricotte, Sam Cornish, Jabari Asim, and Pinkie Gordon Lane.
"Memoir recounting the author's childhood, struggle to overcome a legacy of anger and violence, and journey to become a voice for others"--