Of Grievance and Grief: Marilyn Chin
I first encountered Marilyn Chin’s poetry through a video clip from the San Diego Border Voices Poetry Festival. In the clip Chin—with her wild wavy hair and red lipstick—faces the…
Built of Voices: Kiese Laymon and Leigh Stein
Kiese Laymon and Leigh Stein do not appear to share much in the way of common experience. Laymon is a black man from Mississippi; Stein is a white half-Jewish woman…
6 Meditations Toward an Appreciation of Lynne Savitt
1. To Begin with Freud There’s a famous (or infamous, and possibly apocryphal) Sigmund Freud quote, which is also posthumously attributed and likely offhand: “The great question that has never…
The Public “I” of Julie Otsuka
Few writers of color in the twenty-first century work in the fierce tones of the Black Arts and Red Power movements. Few writers of any race, working in any genre,…
The Spectre of Gender Equality
In End of Equality, Beatrix Campbell, a British writer and activist, draws upon a career of feminist analysis and agitation to present a brief treatise on gender-based inequality. This book…
The Bully, the Buddy, and the Populist Press
Doris Kearns Goodwin is America’s most popular active historian. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II (1995),…
Concern for the Destiny of the Country: Indian Feminist Novels
Indian literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee has said that the essential concern of the twentieth-century Indian novelist was the changing national scene and the destiny of the country. She was referring…
404: Identity Not Found
In March 2008, a month shy of his forty-fifth birthday, the critic and poet Reginald Shepherd was battling an aggressive form of colon cancer. The disease had already metastisized to…
Out of Body: Reading Gender Through “Women’s Fiction”
It was a book my two boys wanted me to read to them over and over again: the story of how Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel, Mary Ann, dug…