Years ago, I took a coming-of-age course in the summer as part of my MA degree. My professor and mentor, G, taught the memoir Fun Home and gave us a crash course in reading and understanding comics. Included in this lesson were excerpts from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I purchased a copy and have taught excerpts when I taught art and comics to my own students, but I never fully delved into the text until now. It’s a wonderful and worthwhile journey. McCloud took an […]
Nick Offerman is a magnificent human man.
Anyone who knows me knows what an enormous fan I am of Parks and Recreation. While I am always and forever Team Leslie Knope, I still adore the other characters and want their real-life counterparts to succeed. Some of my favorite sub-plots involve the twisted relationship of Ron and Tammy (I have a nostalgic fondness for Will and Grace, so Megan Mullally makes me delighted instantly), so imagine my feverish joy when I found out that Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally were actually married…TO EACH […]
Our bodies, our selves.
Years and years ago, my beloved theory professor and mentor at my MA institution recommended Jeanette Winterson, and most specifically, Written on the Body, if I wanted to better grasp queer theory and literature. I found a copy at Goodwill but have not opened it until now, and now I regret only the many years that I did not absorb this amazing and beautifully-written text. This novel is written in a nonlinear fashion by an author whose gender is never specified. This author discusses past […]
I don’t know if I got out of this book what I was supposed to…and my head hurts thinking about it.
As an avid reader of literary fiction, I make it a habit to read the Man Booker Prize winning novel each year. I’m always curious to see what the committee selects, as well as their rationale for the prize. For two years in a row, a black male author has won the prize—last year’s winner, Marlon James, wrote a hefty tome about Jamaica, A Brief History of Seven Killings. This year’s winner, American Paul Beatty, wrote a much shorter book that took me almost the […]
A stunning debut about police brutality and teenagers.
As you all know, I’ve been trying to expand my diverse books knowledge, and The Chancellor recommended a few that he thought would be great companion pieces to one of my new YA favorites, All American Boys. I’ve already read and reviewed Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down, and today, I finished Angie Thomas’s extraordinary debut, The Hate U Give. The novel begins when our protagonist Starr witnesses her childhood best friend Khalil being shot by a police officer while she sits in the passenger […]
Unpacking the ripple effects of a shooting
I’m always on the lookout for diverse books, especially if they are culturally relevant. The Chancellor recommended me two books: Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down and Angie Thomas’s The Hate You Give. I’m currently reading the latter, so you’ll get to read my review later this weekend (I hope), but I just finished the former, and it was an interesting, engaging, thought-provoking book. Tariq Johnson leaves a convenience store buying groceries, when the owner chases after him, shouting, “Come back!” A white man stops […]
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