I self-published my memoir The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans in October 2016 after spending more than 20 years working on one version of the story or another. The book’s name comes from two sources. The concept of being an orphan, particular in the Black community, may seem jarring. We are, after all, known […]
Transitioning back into writing full-time has also meant getting used to learning how to manage my time — or, I guess, reclaiming it (thank you, Auntie Maxine) — but it also means that as my friend Jennifer has remarked, you realize that “Linear time is a trip.” Anyway, I worked on this piece for the […]
When the bombings started in Austin, I was distracted by other things like a lot of other folks. I saw 17-year-old Draylen Mason’s name and that he had been attacked, but I didn’t register a connection between him and the other people who were being harmed in Austin until too late, until Governor Abbott decided […]
Trigger warning for the trauma of homelessness and mental illness This beautiful New York Times profile of Nakesha Williams, a Williams College graduate who died homeless on the street at the age of 46, was the first thing I read yesterday. My friend Amy sent it to me, saying it reminded her of the story […]
I haven’t been blogging that regularly since the holidays because I’ve been working on some longer form essays and works in progress, along with working on work work and doing other things. But I wanted to take a bit of time to reflect on the 50th anniversary of The Kerner Report and its meaning for […]
Roses for the living. I was thinking of this saying when I first heard that Erica Garner had a heart attack and we were all hopeful for recovery. I was surrounded by my family, and my sweet nephew led us in prayer for her, and my thoughts were consumed with her and her family, what […]
In 2004, when She Hate Me came out, I was assigned to write a story about Spike Lee for the San Francisco Chronicle, where I was a young features reporter at the time. The movie’s tagline was: “One heterosexual male. 18 lesbians. His fee…$10,000 each.” Like a lot of Spike Lee’s work, I thought the […]
Since How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why the Future of Journalism Depends on Women and People of Color was published at the end of August, life has been a bit hectic, but in the best way. After three years of working, moving, working, writing and researching the book, working, moving again, editing the […]
This is a stack of my contributor copies for my new book, How Racism and Sexism Killed Traditional Media: Why the Future of Journalism Depends on Women and and People of Color. It’s scheduled to be published August 31. I owe so much of the existence of this book to my mentors and colleagues in […]
A friend and I were discussing the heroics of Bree Newsome this weekend when I ran out of things to say. Driving in the rain, attending to the life chores that are demanded of us, I was at a loss for how to describe the light that filled me when I saw the video of her climbing that […]
