as long as i can remember i’ve always stitched cloth into the dreams people manage after the earthquake hopelessness captured me like a body-bag husband missing but my machine survived people bring cloth my fingers stitch scraps into newness I’ve been sewing since I was nine years old, maybe even younger. I […]
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Vibrations Cooking Forever: Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, we love you….
Vertamae Smart Grosvenor, one of the most magical human beings to ever grace the planet, transcended September 3, 2016. I got to know her in the beloved community of artist, activists, classical people of New York’s Harlem. I’d been a fan, an acolyte since I read Vibrations Cooking back in the Tennessee of my youth. […]
Uncertainty by Opal Palmer Adisa: a story of family and longing
Uncertainty Well after Daddy had left, and the two police officers and all the domestic helpers had settled down and returned to their respective duties as did the gardeners, and even Ms. Sally, after what seemed like an inordinately long time of her craning her neck, right then left, scanning the entire street –Ms. Sally, […]
Daddy Come: Memoir of Family by Opal Palmer Adisa
Three images from Jamaican Men: Father Artist, Father Shopkeeper, Father Artist, also by Opal Palmer Adisa Dawn and I were playing by the hedge. We had picked a handful of red flowers and stuck some in our hair. Dawn said hibiscus were good for shining shoes. […]
Writers Adrienne Kennedy & Tanya Selvaratnam
The writers Adrienne Kennedy and Tanya Selvaratnam met when Kennedy was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University, where Selvaratnam was a student, and they both lived in Adams House. Kennedy’s play Funnyhouse of a Negro is currently playing until June 19 at Signature Theater in New York City. Selvaratnam will perform in Brooke O’Harra’s I’m […]
My Black Dance: Work-in-Progress on the Legacy
Dance & music are inseparable have been one of passions of mine from the first beats of my heart. Yes. I believe that these universal languages are recognized by our soul and spirit long before intellect is developed. When I heard music as a child, I moved. […]
When Mother Goes Away
“Mommy Gone’”is the first piece in a series of vignettes, that might be the start of my memoir, which I have been resisting. Suddenly it feels right, timely. This story is my first memory of lost/separation and it still lingers today, five decades later. I sometimes wonder if that is why I am so […]
ALT Launches with Peter Kimani’s A Kiss in the Dark
The most important deal a business person will ever close is her first no matter whether you’re a shopkeeper, a restaurant, or in the business of publishing, book and author development such as me. My firm is called Adero’s Literary Tribe/ALT, launched this Summer. Our first accomplishment is a publication deal for Peter Kimani, a […]
A bit of Irenosen Okojie’s Butterfly Fish, an excerpt of the novel
DISCOMBOBULATED HERD First the wives went bald. Their gleaming crowns like plump brown melons waiting to be pulped, clutching their thick, fluffy hair as if they would vanish like puffs of smoke. And by now the palace grounds were vomiting. Dead insects littered hidden crooks, red ants rolled on their backs in haste and confusion, […]
Outside the Tin Palace: A photograph, 1976 by Patricia Spears Jones
Outside the Tin Palace: A photograph, 1976 This exploration of the 1970s started with a photograph—a way into memory or mystery. I can’t remember why we gathered. I do remember that I was still dating Victor so very handsome, my second Afro-Puerto Rican boyfriend. He introduced me to Salsa, and published my David Murray poem […]
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