Category: journalism

Review for Oprah Daily: Of Women and Salt

I am beside myself with joy over sharing with you that I am contributing to book coverage for Oprah Magazine online, now the Oprah Daily. I wrote about the gorgeous Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia for the Oprah Daily launch today.

The novel opens in 2018 with Carmen lamenting her daughter Jeannette’s opioid addiction, desperately hoping she will get sober, survive. This is not the American dream Carmen had envisioned for her family when she migrated from Cuba to Miami. Carmen writes: Maybe if I had a way of seeing all the past, all the paths, maybe I’d have some answer as to why: Why did our lives turn out this way?

Readers are then whisked back to 1866 and introduced to Carmen’s great-grandmother, Maria Isabel, who was the only female employee in an all-male cigar factory in Camagüey, Cuba. Antonio, Carmen’s great-grandfather, enchanted Maria Isabel by reading aloud to her and other workers to help pass the time. He reads from novels by Alexander Dumas, from Shakespeare’s plays, from news stories—his aim to help distract them from their toil, and from the encroachment of guerrilla fighting in their town. Maria Isabel herself cannot read, but in listening to Antonio she wonders: “Can one learn to fall in love with a mind?”

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Book Review: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Happy summer, as happy as it can be, I suppose. I wanted to drop by to rave a little about Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece, Caste, publishing soon and definitely one for you to pick up. Here’s my full review from the Sunday Boston Globe and an excerpt:

“With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be,” writes Isabel Wilkerson in her new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” “America is an old house.” It is a simple analogy that is classic Wilkerson, whose previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” chronicled the Great Migration through the masterful weaving of thousands of narratives within the United States. In her new book, which should be required reading for generations to come and is as propulsive a reading experience as her debut, she turns her attention to India, Germany, and what their histories have in common with America’s.

A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, “Caste” removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” Wilkerson explains, “an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry.” Using examples from around the world, she goes on to demonstrate how the codification of caste throughout the world has hardened economic and political inequality into seemingly permanent markers of difference.

Meditations on Staying Safe in the Bronx

Probably like everyone else, I have my decent days under self-isolation and I have my difficult ones. Increasingly, they are complex, especially as the parental holidays approach…but every day now has some kind of asterisk, doesn’t it? Here’s my latest on Medium, (here’s a friend link!) which, like everything I seem to write, is about the Bronx but also about trying to navigate grief and humanity and showing up for ourselves in the midst of all of it.

Before the pandemic, my hometown had been changing dramatically, while also remaining very much anchored in what it has always been. The Bronx is always treated like a predominately Latinx and Black outpost of New York City. But it is actually the city, too. At last Census count, there were roughly 1.4 million people here.

Like Queens, the Bronx has been highlighted as an epicenter within an epicenter of the coronavirus because of the high rates of infection and death among people of color here. The deaths of people of color from coronavirus have been at rates 50 percent and higher here in the Bronx compared to Manhattan, with some of the wealthiest zip codes in the city.

Many stories have documented the health disparities that have been laid bare — showing that many black people at higher risk of being infected because of long-standing problems accessing affordable health care, distrust of healthcare providers and our likelihood of being among the ranks of essential workers.

I share in the collective anticipatory grief — grieving those you know will die — that now hangs over the city. It also feels hauntingly familiar. My father died by suicide a decade ago this month. As shocked and confused and angry as I was then, as long as it has taken for me to try to peel apart all of the emotions that still feel fresh in that grief, I know that to lose him now, when the way that we mourn is even shifting, would come with an additional stain and stigma.

I felt the most anticipatory grief for my mother, who died almost two years after my father in 2012. I watched her skin shrivel around her eyes and cheeks as Stage IV cervical cancer ate away at the fleshy, coy expressions she always made that taught me the finer ways to flirt, to help joy shine from one’s face.

In those months and days before she died, I felt a lot like I do now: I kept a daily vigil at the edge of the world I used to know with her at the center, whether I wanted her there or not. Mourning itself felt like a virus I needed to save others from.

A Black History Month Reading List, Part 1

Some of you have been kind enough to follow my musings about individual books on my new YouTube channel, Black Book Stacks. This is a natural endeavor for me, to find, devour and support books by and about Black people, who I define as people from throughout the African Diaspora. This is an evolving definition, I guess; I was reading David Yoon’s Frankly In Love, which is an addictive YA book that delves into interracial dating and intraracial friendship, including with his Black friend Q. Frankly In Love is a good, recent example of the kind of book that blends a lot of different kinds of diversity and that was part of what thrilled me about it.

I forget who I was talking to who said this, but it stuck with me: Black people in this country do not have the luxury of having as long a literary tradition as any other group in America because of the legacy of slavery. Because of being forbidden to read or write. To me, that makes it that much more important to lift up books that recover and restore us to ourselves; that expand what we know of ourselves and our lineage, real and imagined. Anyway, here is the beginning of a list of some essentials of Black history, to me, anyway, that can be a good resource and are some of my favorite books that filled in important gaps for me along my reading journey:

  1. (New) Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby | I have the great fortune of having both a copy of the original Daughters of Africa, and the newest addition, which just expands the important, vast collection of significant work to include 200 writers. A classic.
  2. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde | “Poetry is Not A Luxury,” “Uses of the Erotic,” and many other seminal works by Audre Lorde were first written or delivered as lectures in the 1970s. Like the Combahee River Collective as a whole, she was integral to giving us language to describe and express the interlocking oppressions we know now as an intersectionality framework.
  3. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keanga Yamahtta-Taylor | I was not familiar with Dr. Yamahtta-Taylor’s work until I taught it at the New School, and hearing first hand from the likes of Barbara Smith, Barbara Ransby and Alicia Garza helped contextualize not only a lot of what we’re seeing now in terms of how Black women are dismissed or lifted up, depending on the community, but also how much has happened behind the scenes along the way.
  4. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance — a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle L. McGuire | No disrespect to Rosa Parks, but I did not know the name of Claudette Colvin until I read McGuire’s book, of my own volition, long after undergrad, where I had Africana Studies as a minor and learned a good deal, just not enough.
  5. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson | It’s hard to believe that 2020 is the 10th anniversary of this book’s publication (!) but what an incredible work of scholarship, recovery and re-membering from Wilkerson, who, if memory serves, interviewed thousands for this book, including a young pre-presidential hopeful named Barack Obama. No list of important Black historical texts is complete without this one.

Words of Fire is another underrated anthology of Black Feminist thought; Black Skin, White Masks has always haunted me, and Sisters of the Yam, by bell hooks, was the beginning of my understanding of wellness and self-care.

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on these books if you’ve read them, or what books you consider essential to learning about Black history are.

Happy Pub Day to I Can Write the World

Happy publication day to us!
I’ve thought for months about how to best commemorate this day. I’ve been posting and talking and writing and talking about I Can Write the World since last year, so it’s hard to believe that the rest of the world will have access to my labor of love starting today. 
It might surprise you that I never thought I’d write a children’s book, let alone a series. Many of you know that I had a childhood that made me grown in many ways before my time, just like a lot of little Black girls who have our innocence taken or presumed to be a non-entity. But when Six Foot Press’ publisher, Chul R. Kim, asked if I had a children’s book to write, Ava Murray arrived fully formed — a curious girl with incredible storytellers and justice warriors as her namesake in the brilliant storyteller Ava DuVernay and Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, the poet, scholar and legal pioneer who broken barriers even while Murray struggled with gender dysmorphia. 
I was raised in the Bronx, an underdog borough often defined — like Black women — by lack, poverty and everything that it is not. But just like I always sought out Black women role models and lighthouses of beauty and class, I have always seen the best of the Bronx even when I struggled within it because of poverty. Some people see a place that has been neglected because of the Latinx and Black people, largely immigrants, who are stuck or striving; people for whom success would mean being able to leave for a less abandoned, more expensive, whiter place. But I missed the Bronx every single time I left, even though I was in beautiful elite spaces that were supposed to be better for me, were supposed to be indicators I was moving up. 
This is what home is: It is the place where you are most yourself, where you can feel yourself becoming more of your dreams by the minute, regardless of what you or others may see right before you. 
This is what I loved about my girl Ava as soon as she arrived: She came asking questions about the media she absorbed. She is far less shy than I was, with a parent that is more present, more receptive, more attentive, as so many Black mothers and maternal figures are.
Why, she wonders, is a little girl getting arrested for tagging outside when the murals and graffiti around the poor neighborhoods — which, by the way, have become a global force and industry — actually feel like they make it easier to see the beauty there? As adults, we can say and observe that this is heavy for little kids to encounter, but my answer to that is that we already see that they are witnessing this world of criminalizing Black and Brown children. Not just in the Bronx, but everywhere where teachers tell me 7-year-olds have to report to court monthly to talk to strangers to justify their living here in the U.S. Of course, too, at our borders, where toddlers cry unattended, may have to sleep on warehouse floors, may not be allowed to bathe. 
I had the great privilege of being at Essence Festival this weekend and hearing Michelle Obama talk about the kind of world we want our children to inherit, to live in. I am not yet a parent, but I know that I want our babies to grow up in a world where they know that their voices are important. That they can write their stories. That they can write the world. Not only can they write their world; in order for the world to be the best it can be, for the world to be hold, they must. 
I say happy publication day to us because any book’s publication day is the representation of the work of dozens of people. Thank you for being in partnership with me as I seek to tell stories for young readers. This book is for you. Thank you to Charly Palmer, the gifted illustrator who so thoughtfully crafted the beauty of Ava’s world. Thank you to Six Foot Press and Serendipity Literary Agency for all of the support. Thank you to everyone at Ingram for your encouragement. To my librarian, teacher and writer friend communities — Thank you for understanding the vision and helping me share it widely. I hope this book is as meaningful to you as it has been to me. 
I shared this on social media, but during PrideFest/KidFest, a young girl around Ava’s age with barrettes in her hair held the book and lovingly gazed at it and even in the chaotic craziness around us, I could see that small flicker of recognition that you get when you see yourself. And she said, “She looks like me.” And that to me is everything. That is the inspiration for this book, and the next, and the next.

You can buy the book on Indie Bound, Barnes and Noble or Amazon. Please review this book on Amazon and Goodreads please!

I Can Write the World at ALA 2019

Charly Palmer, the wonderful illustrator for I Can Write the World with me at the Ingram Signing Table
We were out of books within 30 minutes – Librarians are incredible!
Sandra held us down when she volunteered to moderate us – Thank you!
I can’t believe my baby is in the world and being received with such love
Chul R. Kim, Publisher of Six Foot Press, with Charly Palmer
Jamia, my hero, & me & Ava
Alison Miner, my Emma classmate & rock star

 

I had a whirlwind weekend launching I Can Write the World at the American Library Association Conference in D.C. Librarians, teachers and others were so receptive to the book that I was the first author in my cohorts to run out of books both on Saturday night at a lovely Ingram reception at Spire and on Sunday afternoon after a great panel discussing the importance of representation in Children’s books. I even got to see a former library professor who popped up in the signing line (thanks for coming by, Stan!).

The most common question librarians had is one that most people ask me, which is “What is this book about?” This comes up right after they say, “Wow, the book is so beautiful!” Which makes my heart sing.

The answer is that I Can Write the World is about 8-year old Ava Murray, who lives in the South Bronx. She is named after the brilliant filmmaker Ava DuVernay and the incredible legal scholar, Episcopalian priest & poet Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, who created the legal precedent known as Jane Crow and, were the world ready for her in her time, might have had a much easier time accepting what we would call her trans identity in this time.

In I Can Write the World, Ava notices the beauty of the Bronx that she knows and loves is at odds with how journalists often depict her world. On the news, a little girl about her age is fined for tagging, which confuses Ava because she sees the colorful murals around her as making the city more beautiful. Her mother, Kim, explains that journalists are like the window frame around their living room window and they shape what we see when we look out of it. Ava decides that she wants to become a journalist so that she can be just like them and shape the world they see.

The first book in the series has Ava exploring more of hip hop culture and how it came to be through a prose poem. I’m honored to say that one of my writing heroines Jacqueline Woodson has called I Can Write the World, “Lovely and timely.” I hope you will find it to be the same. Thank you so much to everyone who has pre-ordered and shared your thoughts with me about the book. I’d be so grateful if you could also write reviews and spread the word. You can find the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and several other outlets.

Next stops for I Can Write the World signings are the Children’s Institute (Ci7) & PrideFest on Sunday — which includes a book giveaway for the first 100 kids.

On Cooking & Vegetables Unleashed

As much as I love writing & sketching, sometimes, honestly, my creative situation is not abundant.

I don’t understand writer’s block — thank God, I’ve never really struggled to get things down on the page. But revising said words is something else.  There are times when I can’t read another word or the writing is…stale. This is usually around the time that I decide that, in my mind, I’m a professional chef…that no one knows about because I rarely unmask my culinary inclinations.

I taught myself to cook in my twenties when I realized that I wasn’t making enough as a rookie reporter to pay for going out to eat pretty much ever. Some of the things I used to eat make me sad to remember — there was the standard meal of Velveeta Shells & Cheese + Frozen Jumbo Shrimp via the Beaumont, Texas 24-hour Wal-Mart (also the site of much of my entertainment, aside from my obsession with Big Brother); a steady diet of Chunky soup for lunch when I lived in a closet-sized studio in Oakland and every burrito & breakfast taco known to mankind when I lived in Austin.

I was first introduced to vegetables as a food group I could get behind when I visited the farmer’s market in Oakland and the Berkeley Bowl a little further north. (For those of you who complain about Whole Foods on a weekend, Berkeley Bowl felt like that at all times multiplied by a thousand).

I would sheepishly pick up lettuce and spinach and occasionally an avocado, but all the other veggies might as well have had stickers with question marks on them. I thought fennel and leeks and artichokes were fresh (as in beautiful) to look at, but they intimidated me as someone who was really not into vegetables that didn’t act as side kicks for food with parents because I couldn’t figure out how to make them taste good by themselves.

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Aguacates con cosas – Guacamole Salad from José Andres’ new, lovely & informative Cookbook, Vegetables Unleashed

Over the years I’ve gotten much better about this. I have a small collection of cookbooks, like the Joy of Cooking and Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. These help me jazz up Brussel Sprouts and green beans, mostly as guidance for what flavors work together and what flavors don’t. Bittman has a simmered Brussel Sprout recipe with breadcrumbs that is delish, for example.

José Andres’ new Vegetables Unleashed is even better than that — the gorgeous photography and Andres’ trademark wit demonstrate the kind of confidence and creativity that make you feel brave enough to try almost anything in the kitchen. It’s also published under the Anthony Bourdain imprint and we’re nearing the anniversary of Bourdain’s death; I wrote about the CNN-produced book about him here.

It helped me admit to myself that fear of leeks is odd and one of these days I’m going to get over it.) The best thing about the book is that it is written in Andres’ trademark wit underscored by a clear expertise about what you should have in your pantry — I’ve added organic miso that I’m not confident enough to experiment with but I’ll try; but he also recommends Paprika, harissa and some others that you’ll need to go to a gourmet shop to find — how to use the parts of veggies that we often throw away and how to add flair to decidedly unsexy vegetables like, say, corn. For the latter, there’s a delicious Austin Grill Corn Soup that looks like heaven in a bowl.

The Plant Index
I used to be part of the 42 percent, but I’m trying to be better.

I wanted to try a few of these recipes but I ran out of time because life. Aguacates con Cosas is like a guacamole salad that has chopped up tomatillos in it. You can add tortillas or anything else to it to give it a crunch, but it was delightfully textured and delicious. It maybe took me 15-20 minutes to chop up the red onions, lime, tomatillos and smash the avocados. His version has cilantro and pomegranate seeds. I added the former and I inhaled this with chips and then made another batch that I ate with a spoon. For this recipe and others, you should definitely check out the book. It just so happens there looks like there’s an event at Politics and Prose coming up tonight, if you’re in D.C.

MyAguacates

 

 

 

 

Patsy Review in TIME Magazine

 

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I loved Patsy so much that I got the beautiful book hangover that one gets when you miss the 400+ pages that took you on an epic journey. I’m really proud of this TIME Magazine review:

 

There have been few narrative epics that effectively tally the emotional, logistical, physical, psychological and financial trials of the black female immigrant and mother or, likewise, the impact on the family of a black woman who dares transform herself. Dennis-Benn maps the internal terrain of black women yearning to be free — without romanticizing or ignoring their flaws. Yes, her central characters are persistent, but they can also be naive. Yes, these are strong black women, but they’re also human, and they’re nearly broken by loneliness, despair and a sense that they’ll never belong. Showing us the triumphs and pitfalls of these two parallel rites of passage, Patsy fills a literary void with compassion, complexity and tenderness.

Harlem Eat Up, Part Two

Last year, when I was just starting to freelance for the Village Voice (R.I.P.), I was starting to gather notes about Harlem Eat Up, the annual two-day festival of Harlem’s food scene co-founded by celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson. When I attended in 2018, my intention was to focus on some graduates of the NYC Food Business Pathways program, one of New York’s food incubators for working class and low-income entrepreneurs with a passion for the food business.

I met the inspiring Jessica Spaulding, who runs the Harlem Chocolate Factory. Spaulding is a Harlem native who expressed some worry about how to keep her business sustainable as money flows to her neighborhood, but doesn’t always find its way to Black entrepreneurs. It was encouraging, then, to see her at the fifth annual Harlem EatUp, which is a true multicultural display of creativity and the expansion of food entrepreneurship as a multi-sensory experience. It’s delightful to sample dishes, cocktails and desserts from local businesses as well as to get the opportunity to learn more about the many gifted chefs and entrepreneurs around us.

Harlem, like the South Bronx, has been reduced in recent years to conversations around gentrification, which is unfortunate. The women I spoke to at Harlem Eat Up, Spaulding included, think that a mix of old and new in Harlem can only be good.

After a few hours in the sun, taking in the sights and familiar faces of proud New Yorkers from last year, it was easy to see what they mean — change is often complicated, but it doesn’t have to be bad. This year it felt like growth had been good not just for Samuelsson and his restaurant, Red Rooster, but also for people who know, love and live in Harlem.

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Cardi B urrito
Created by chef Kevin Thai with Dear Mama, the Cardi B-urrito is a delicious breakfast burrito with housemade green chorizo, salsa verde, soft-scrambled eggs, mozzarella, sweet potato hash + Mexican spicy corn chips (or takis). It’s as delicious as it looks.

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I miss having a garden so much that sometimes I just take pictures of plants for no reason when they’re all gathered this way.

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BarillaPastaYummy
This Mushroom Orecchiette doesn’t look nearly as delicious as it tastes.

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Thanks, Barilla, for sharing the recipe – I’m definitely going to try this one!

 

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I loved this retro display in front of the Red Rooster booth. They had delicious savory tacos, which were really popular this year; in the first ten minutes of walking around the Harlem Stroll and the Ultimate Taster’s test, I had five different tacos. 

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Chef, Actor and Author of the hosting book, Life is a Party, David Burtka with Chef Marcus Samuelsson 

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This gentleman was the mad scientist & this contraption was very cool

New York Times Book Review on Elizabeth Acevedo’s New Book

When I heard Elizabeth Acevedo read at last year’s inaugural Bronx Book Festival, I understood exactly why The Poet X was as important and astounding as the author herself. It wasn’t just an authentic narrative for authenticity’s sake, but a work of beauty particularly for women of color meant to inspire them to find their voices and paths. It took my breath away.

With The Fire on High was similar – a beautiful page-turner. I couldn’t wait to share with y’all that I got the assignment of a lifetime to write about it for the New York Times Book Review. Below is an excerpt, but if you read the whole thing, I’d love to hear your feedback — especially if you’ve read the book, which you should definitely get a copy of.

 

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Xiomara is like the more subdued fictive kin of Emoni Santiago, the self-possessed heroine of Acevedo’s second novel, WITH THE FIRE ON HIGH (HarperTeen, 400 pp., $17.99; ages 13 and up). A talented aspiring chef and unapologetic teenage mother, Emoni is as stubbornly committed to following her dreams as Xiomara is, but she cares less about other people’s perceptions. Anchored by her baby girl, Emma, and her grandmother Gloria (whom she calls ‘Buela), Emoni is sure of everything except whom she can trust as she chases her dream of running her own kitchen.

The nomenclature theme nods to Emoni’s maturity and integrity, and her attention to detail. She knows her own name is a signifier of her Afro-Latinx identity; “Emma,” on the other hand, “is the kind of name that didn’t tell you too much before you met her, the way mine does,” Emoni tells us. “Because nobody ever met a white girl named Emoni, and as soon as they see my name on a résumé or college application they think they know exactly what kind of girl they getting.”

What a wrong assumption. “Information ain’t free, so my daughter’s name wasn’t going to tell anybody any information they didn’t earn.”