November 20, 2020

Remembering William Melvin Kelley, author of A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University Anthony Reed remembers William Melvin Kelley.   William Melvin Kelley is often described as a “lost” or “forgotten” author. Those who needed to know about him have always had a way of finding him. As a young writer, interested in fiction and poetry, I knew a lot about

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November 18, 2020

Neal Gabler on Teaching the Next Generation About Their Political Heritage

Contributed by Neal Gabler, author of Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 What happened to America?  What happened to bring us to this moment of deep and perhaps unbridgeable polarization, of disorder and chaos, of skepticism about science, institutions, even the very idea of fact itself, of rising white supremacy, of

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November 11, 2020

A Note to Teachers From Pity the Reader Author Suzanne McConnell

By: Suzanne McConnell As a teacher of fiction writing at Hunter College, I was always on the look-out for a book to use in classes that was instructive but not academic.  I wanted a non-textbook text that was compelling, entertaining, encouraging, and practical – one that delivered helpful news about writing in such a way

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October 28, 2020

Martin J. Sherwin gives a reinterpretation of the Cuban Missile Crisis

By Martin J. Sherwin The Cuban Missile Crisis ended peacefully because neither President John Kennedy nor Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted a war. It ended peacefully because Fidel Castro frightened Khrushchev into believing that the United States was about to start a war. It ended without a war because America’s ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai

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