I’ve been reading some of the beautiful and important memoirs of the Movement for Black Lives that are forthcoming from Black feminists like Barbara Ransby & Charlene Carruthers as well as screening Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin story, which begins airing tonight on the Paramount Network, since the end of June. I wrote about […]
Summer Music & Magic
I’ve been more quiet than usual because I’ve been dusting off my photography/summer counselor skills at Jewish surf camp (!) [more on that later, obviously] interviewing my share of incredible writers for Kirkus Reviews, reading and watching and reporting all of kinds of other things for other stories, finishing up my work in progress draft, […]
When your greatest shame is also what makes you free
The spring before I left the Bronx to go to boarding school, to accept a scholarship that would change the entire trajectory of my life, I had an abortion. I was 15. I was raised a devout Catholic; I’ve always been a deeply spiritual person. But I also had been so desperately lonely for such […]
On Black Independence & the Fourth of July
Black folks call Juneteenth the Black Fourth of July because it was the birth of our nation, a fact that King BeyoncĂ© — the force of nature and Black woman genius I have admired as she has continued to evolve over the years — had to have known when her collaboration with Jay-Z, “Everything is […]