Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten, 1936 Happy Black History Month! February 1 is also the birthday of Langston Hughes  (1902-1967),...

King Holiday (Photo © Randy Pressman) Tonight, I'll be reading poetry with some of my favorite writers, Erica Doyle, Christopher S...

Today's New York Times brought a bit of news I hadn't read anywhere before, which is that Haitians have begun to emigrate from ...

Gates talks with Brazilian rapper, MV Bill Henry Louis Gates Jr. 's 4-part PBS series Black in Latin America , which ran for each...

The other day, in the midst of more hairpulling over the current US political paralysis and continuous series of bad choices that the adm...

Haiti an-American Edwidge Danticat (at right, www.swisseduc.ch) one of the most talented writers of her generation, writes in this week...

Readers, I am now having to confront regular spammers who, I assume, are paid to post ad, phishing or malbot links on the blog. If these con...

Some weeks back, perhaps at the start of the new academic quarter when I had a smidgeon of time and was feeling thoughtful, I tweeted about ...

Today's New York Times has a Lede blog post about a Miami Herald report on the situation in Jacmel , Haiti , the country's arts ca...

I'm beginning this blog post with a little test: using GoGoinflight.com 's service, I'm connecting to the Net while on my flight...

The post-earthquake news out of Haiti is very bad. According to President René Préval , many thousands of people may have died, and many mo...

My thoughts, heart and prayers go out to the people of Haiti , where, as has been widely reported, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck 10 mil...

Many thanks to Joshua Marie Wilkinson and his colleagues at Loyola University of Chicago who hosted the talks + reading that I was fortuna...