Reading A DROP OF PATIENCE Through a Blind-Culture Lens

Written by By M. Leona Godin, author of There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness In William Melvin Kelley’s A Drop of Patience, we follow the life of a young Black musician named Ludlow Washington, who is placed in a school for the blind when he is five and remains there until

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Rediscovering the Sly, Seductive Jazz Mysteries of Charlotte Carter

Thirty years ago, Carter addressed racism, colorism, classism, and sexism head on. Her books feel just as relevant today.   This essay by Caitlin Landuyt, editor, Vintage Books, was previously published on Crime Reads   Nanette Hayes, the Black jazz saxophonist/Francophile/reluctant crime solver of Charlotte Carter’s Rhode Island Red, Coq au Vin, and Drumsticks, blew into my life

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Colson Whitehead has won his second Pulitzer Prize for THE NICKEL BOYS

Colson Whitehead has won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Nickel Boys. This is his second Pulitzer Prize (his novel The Underground Railroad won in 2017) and he is only the fourth writer—alongside Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike—to win two Pulitzer Prizes each in the Fiction category. Winner, ALA Alex Award Winner,

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FROM THE PAGE: Washington Black

Washington Black follows “Wash” Black, an eleven-year-old field slave on a sugar plantation in Barbados. When Wash’s old master dies, the plantation’s already dire living conditions immediately worsen. Wash is then selected to become a manservant to his new master’s brother, a man who, as it turns out, is not only an abolitionist, but an inventor,

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