Quote: William Melvin Kelley

'

William Melvin Kelley (1937-2017: RIP), from "My Next to Last Hit by 'C. C. Johnson'," in Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe, edited by Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, with an introduction by Randall Kennedy, New York: New York University Press, 1993.

(I only learned recently, thanks to an email from Chris Stackhouse, that Kelley had passed away. One of the most inventive and productive--during the decade from 1960 through 1970, when his last book appeared--Black writers of his generation, and the author of four published novels and a collection of stories, he should be read much more regularly as part of the 20th century African American literary canon. You can read a 2012 interview with him here.)

Toni Morrison & Ishmael Reed @ Harlem Arts

This past Sunday brought the sort of event that too seldom occurs: two of the leading African American writers and cultural avatars--two of the leading American writers and cultural avatars--in a conversation guided by the third, in an intimate, welcoming non-academic setting. Or perhaps this does occur frequently but I have not been around to catch it. As soon as a friend alerted me that Toni Morrison (1931-) and Ishmael Reed (1938-) would participate in a conversation, led by Quincy Troupe (1939-) in Harlem no less, at the home of Quincy and Margaret Porter Troupe, as part of the Harlem Arts Salon, which has been presenting amazing programs for years now, I let friends know and got a ticket so as not to miss them. I have seen (and drawn) Toni Morrison a number of times, I studied with Ishmael Reed as an undergraduate, and I have heard Quincy Troupe read his work and was fortunate to have him select one of the first poems I ever had published in a mass circulation publication years ago, but I had never seen them all together chatting publicly. And it goes without saying that they did not disappoint.

Toni Morrison, after the talk (Eugene Redmond behind her)

Before I provide a few highlights of their conversation, let me first note that a number of other wonderful writers and literary folks (and I will certainly accidentally miss some people, so forgive me) were present, among them John Edgar Wideman, Marilyn Nelson, Eugene Redmond, Steve Cannon, Elizabeth Nunez, Keith Gilyard, Kate Rushin, Tyehimba Jess, Tonya Foster, Randall Horton, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Lorelei Williams, Brenda Greene, and Charles Ruas, just to name a few. That was just (part of) the audience, which poured into some three or four rooms of Margaret and Quincy Troupe's beautiful home. So packed was the gathering that I sat in a side room, with many others, and watched the luminaries on a screen, though I could hear them clearly just a room away. Acclaimed Bay Area artist Mildred Howard prepared a range of delicious, healthy meals, as well as some of the softest, most scrumptious but not too sweet sugar cookies I've eaten in years. Also, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Open Space blog featured a streaming livecast of the event, and you can watch the entire conversation here. (A head's up: I'm briefly visible behind the video technician.) Lastly, poet Rich Villar, co-curator and one of the main forces behind the Acentos Foundation, which nurtures and promotes Latino/a writers and literature, delivered a spirited introduction to the event and for all three writers that did him and them proud.

Morrison and Reed have known each other for many years, going back to the period when both were living in New York and beginning their careers, and both have known Troupe as well since the late 1960s; Morrison and Troupe met at the loft that late, great writer Toni Cade Bambara had once maintained in Harlem. Rich Villar even read biographical notes for each from the mid 1970s, when they were already quite accomplished and yet still early in their careers. The conversation proceeded with Troupe asking open-ended questions about several topics, ranging from teachers who had an influence, to literary and cultural models, to the importance of geography, to how each writer wrote on a daily basis, to their thoughts on contemporary literature, and each spoke at length, with Reed (one of the best teachers I have ever had, and the first person to publish me in my adult life) often divagating into topics he wanted to discuss, and Morrison mostly sticking to the question but providing delectable anecdotes and motes of wisdom as she did so.

Margaret Porter Troupe and Ishmael Reed

Some of my favorite Morrison comments were when she was describing how, as an undergraduate at Howard, she had wanted to write on blacks in Shakespeare, but her professor felt this was outlandish and denigrated her. (She would have been ahead of her time on this topic, as subsequent scholarship has made quite clear.) She mentioned this anecdote as a way of distinguishing such professors from the ones who were more open, nurturing and forward-thinking, among them Sterling Brown, the great poet, and Alain Locke, the philosopher, whose "personal idiosyncrasies," such as using a handkerchief to touch doorknobs and folding a napkin on the desk onto which he placed his thereafter unmoving hands she found even more compelling than his difficult philosophizing. With regard to influences, she mentioned how important James Baldwin's essays were, particularly his evocative and effective use of language, and she also praised Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka for not "writing under the [white] gaze", something she has always striven not to do. One powerful aspect of Achebe's work she noted was a moment in which a male character is about to depart his home, and loving runs his hands through the thick hair of his wife. This small loving gesture towards hair that is so often reviled (even in Africa) was something many readers might overlook, but she found it telling about Achebe's mindset and larger aesthetic and social outlook, and worth thinking about in relation to her own writing.

Quincy Troupe

Morrison also talked about being a radio story-telling child, and how, growing up in her family, people would tell stories and then retell them over and over, often changing and transforming them, and expect the children to do the same. (I grew up in a similar environment; stories were retold, and changed, though certain elements were invariant.)  Growing up in Lorain, Ohio, she recalled there were no "black neighborhoods" and that her world was integrated, though her home was a different sort of place, and that the segregation she encountered in Washington while at Howard University, which she chose to attend so that she could be around black intellectuals, black thinkers, her professors and fellow students, became "theater" for her. As she noted, the care and detail, and money, that went into maintaining segregation and segregated facilities was noteworthy--and, I often think, a sign of an societal-wide psychosis, but that's for another time. About her writing routine, she noted that she woke up early, when she was sure she could still be smart on the page, and she provide a bit of insight into her method of characterization, noting that she usually does not describe every attribute of a character, instead writing in such a way that the reader will draw her in our heads, but also know her when we see her in the world. She described this is as "call and response," perhaps the first time I've heard that term used in this regard, and it struck me as deeply insightful and apt.

Toni Morrison signing a book

Ishmael Reed was his usual volcanic self; the years have turned hair almost titanium, but he has lost none of the fire I've always admired. He told the audience that one of his models was the Modernist satirist Nathanaël West, particularly West's non-linear, collage method, which one can see in not only in Reed's earliest fiction but in his most recent novel, Juice (Dalkey, 2011). He also mentioned J. A. Rodgers, the famous autodidactic historian whose work re-educated several generations of black readers, and his peers in the Umbra Group, one of the New York-based early 1960s predecessors to what became the Black Arts Movement and the other innovative artistic movements of that era and ones that followed. Freestyling and riffing off Troupe's questions, Reed moved from "geography" and "region" to a discussion of 19th century Black poets--one of the second moments he appeared in intellectual sync with the work of my former colleague Ivy Wilson--and discussed the courage of some of them in terms of their overt critiques, with so much more at stake, of President Andrew Johnson and other powerful, white figures. He offered some choice quotes, among them that "A good writer is a rival state" (he was quoting ), and "We don't get to tell our stories," meaning that the pipeline remains a narrow one, we often write to the expectations of publishers and certain groups and readers, and so on. (This is far more true in other genres than fiction and poetry, though.) He ended this electric slide of commentary by saying that he wanted to be "like Mike Tyson" in his literature. I think he's achieved that many times over.

Lorelei Williams and Kate Rushin

Responding to the question of how he wrote, Reed discussed waking up and reading the papers every day, and getting angry. (Among his prodigious literary production was a blog he maintained for a while at the San Francisco Chronicle, which I had linked to on this blog. I particularly enjoyed his editorial cartoons, which can acidly funny.) He was angry on Sunday too, noting how Law and Order (I think he said) was planning an episode based on Chris Brown's domestic abuse of Rihanna, only in the episode the Brown-like character was killed. The exploitation and spectacularity of it are the kinds of things Reed has long pointed out, and he was no less acute in his comments. He went on to say, anticipating what Morrison would say, that he was always writing and urged people in the room never to stop writing, but also to write in a variety of genres, undertake a "full-court press." He even spoke about a program for low income students he and his daughter had developed that got them reading and writing, and described it as a "Midnight Basketball During the Day," or Midday Basketball program. The participants, mostly black and latino, told him when he asked why they'd gone off track that they had no idea where they came from, and addressing this problem had long been an aim of his work.

Ishmael Reed on the monitor

A few other points he made involved him talking about learning Yoruba, the language and literature, as a way of studying the roots of African American culture and of another tradition of storytelling. He also talked about his study of Japanese, and how after Reckless Eyeballing, which deeply enraged white feminists and their allies across the country, he became "literary roadkill," though he noted Morrison supported both him and that book, but also that after that he'd followed Langston Hughes's example of going to Japan (and this connection with Japan in particular, I must note editorially, has a history in black innovative art practice; it came up at the Now Dig This! conference as well), where his book Japanese By Spring, as well as his other works, were praised and he was feted. Among his final thoughts were praise for contemporary American writer, in part because of the changing technological landscape, with e-books and print-on-demand possibilities unavailable to earlier generations, and "more players" out there, as opposed to the gatekeepers and literary elites of the past. He did admit to addiction to Facebook, an enthusiasm I'm thankful I've been able to avoid but which many writer friends have not, but Reed flipped it by noting that for him it was also a "platform" of the kind he is so fond of, and so even on Facebook, he is being none other than Ishmael Reed, writing and fighting.

Marilyn Nelson

It was an amazing event, and whetted my desire to catch any and every future Harlem Arts Salon event. It was also a perfect way to spend a Sunday afternoon in New York during Black History Month!

John Edgar Wideman

2012 Harlem Book Fair

Before I post any photos from the 2012 Harlem Book Fair, let me first express my horror and sorrow at the massacre that occurred early Friday morning in Aurora, Colorado, at the midnight showing of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises. The most recent reports I've read say that 12 people have died, and over 50 were injured to varying degrees. I send my condolences to those who have died and wishes for a swift recovery to those who were injured. The police thankfully did immediately capture the murderer, a 24-year-old domestic terrorist named James Eagan Holmes, who had been a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Denver, and who apparently not only slaughtered people in the movie theater, but booby-trapped his apartment to maim authorities who planned to search it. Holmes, had also apparently dressed himself in SWAT-type gear, and set off a smoke bomb to create confusion before he began shooting. I won't use this brief note to pontificate, but I have long believed and will continue to believe that the easy availability of dangerous arms and protective gear of the sort that Holmes easily acquired, the lack of adequate, comprehensive mental health services across the country, and the socially stressed environment, particularly because of economic conditions and political divisions, that so many Americans live under, all help to foster such horrific incidents. What doesn't help is a normalized attitude toward social oppression, and psychic and physical violence, dating back to the country's origins and celebrated in many aspects of our society, that diminishes the seriousness of harming oneself and others, and of death.  What motivated or sparked Holmes's terrible acts I cannot say. That they have happened before I and every American can affirm. That they may happen again, without any serious measures being taken to lessen their likelihood, I must also sadly affirm.

***

Yesterday I dropped by the 2012 Harlem Book Fair, which took place on several blocks alongside the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research branch of the New York Public Library, located at 135th St. and Lenox Avenue in Harlem. I have attended and even participated in the Book Fair in past years, trying as best I can not to miss it in order to support the fair organizers, the authors and publishers, and Harlemworld itself, and to see what new books and book trends it has on display, since many bookstores are not featuring many of these books in the ways they're being presented at the fair. 

What struck me this year was that the venue and the time-span of the fair both seemed to be truncated compared to previous years, but at least to my unscientific appraisal, the number of fair-goers looked higher and the booksellers appeared more enthusiastic. One reason for the added liveliness of this year compared to last might have been the milder temperatures. After a very Hades-like stretch this past week and two days of rain, this weekend brought the sun out, but in moderation and cooling breezes. One of the things I love about this book fair compared to others is how enthusiastic many of the authors and publishers, many tiny or self-publishing outfits, are; in my experience rarely do they complain about having a conversation, signing books, meeting readers or even people just browsing the materials on their tables, or having their photos taken. Some even specifically ask for you to do so. There's also a level of showpersonship that I don't often see at other book fairs. My favorite display was the simplest; it's the final picture I've posted below.

One thing I did not see this year, and also missed last year was any sign that many of the authors were providing their works in the steadily increasing e-book format. As easy as it is to publish a paperback book these days, it's as easy, at least in Amazon's format, to put out an e-book as well. (The Nook and especially the Apple formats are more complicated.) I also didn't see that much emphasis on social media, even though both establishment media and scholars have written about the higher level of engagement among black people, especially black young people, with these sites and platforms. That led me to think that both in terms of the panels, which I didn't attend this time, and among the booksellers and authors, e-books, and related technologies, will be a greater focus in years to come. I also was surprised at the paucity of LGBTIQ authors this year; last year and in previous years, at least by my reckoning, more have been out and about.

One last point: I continue to be surprised, given the longstanding and increasing diversity of New York City's black population, which the Schomburg's affiliated scholars, librarians and archivists have documented, that there are not even more publishers and authors presenting works in languages other than English. Certainly Anglophone writers from North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa are present, but what about Hispanophone authors and books? Books in Portuguese? In Swahili? In Amharic? In Arabic? I did in fact see some books in Arabic, and in previous years I've seen some books in Spanish, but I'm surprised yet again that there aren't more.

Here are photos I snapped at the event. All are captionless they tell their own stories. Enjoy.




































 

 

Marc Bamuthi Joseph's & Theaster Gates's rbGB @ Chicago MoCA

I am not a dance critic nor a dance scholar, let me make that clear. I point this lest I incur the sort of situation that allegedly occurred a few years ago when some kind person cited this blog in a dissertation on dance. It startled my (very generous) colleague who's a leader in that field and happened to be participating in the dissertation defense. So please, dear reader, read these remarks as those of a fan and nothing more.  I do love dance, I love to dance and I love going to see dance performances. I don't do this enough, I'll admit it. Fortunately, last week, I got my tail into gear and headed down to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art to see red black and Green: a blues, the collaboration between Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living World Project and local artist and urban planner Theaster Gates.  This was only one of several events that Joseph/The Living World Project held at MoCA, from April 12-14. Others included a conversation with former Obama administration official and environmental and jobs activist Van Jones; and SHareOUT, which turned the stage over to a number of young Chicago poets and activists, including Young Chicago Authors, Kuumba Lynx, YOUmedia, FilmLAB@1512 and AgLAB@1512 of the Better Boys Foundation, and The MCA Creative Agency. 

Marc Bamuthi Joseph (foreground) dancing, Theaster Gates through door

For red black and Green: a blues, Joseph conducted field research, including interviews and community-based events, for several years, in the four cities--Chicago, New York (Harlem), Houston, and Oakland--that formed the compass points for the performance, which he and collaborators Gates, Chicago native Traci Tolmaire and Tommy Shepherd a.k.a. Emcee Soulati also structured according to the four seasons, four cycles of life, and four rooms of a shotgun-style house (porch, kitchen, bedroom, front/living room).  With Gates, he realized the house metaphor through an interactive and versatile stage installation, a mobile house/set seemingly built out of scraps (an organic, green set), titled The Colored Museum, playing off the title of George C. Wolfe's famous play, that the public could view during museum hours, and which provided the setting and backdrops for each part of the performance. One of the exciting aspects of red black and Green: a blues, was being able to join Joseph, Gates, Tolmaire, and Shepherd down on the stage at the beginning of the performance. Everyone attending, as well as the ushers, were invited to mill about, observe them, find a spot, engage. They not only interacted with the audience, singing and speaking directly to us, handing out watermelon slices, gently ushering us about as the installation-house-set underwent its initial reformulations, but our presence, I think, probably shaped how this first part of the event unfolded, provoking some improvisation. The space itself, then, became embodied, not just by the performers, but by the audience.

Tommy Shepherd, making music

Let me say that Joseph can dance his behind off, as can Tolmaire; Gates can sing; and Shepherd can create any beat you might envision. But they all sang, and danced, and made music. They sang and danced and made music out of seemingly nothing, out of anything, out of everything.  They all also embodied the various people--characters--Joseph had interviewed, harmoniously fitting together the documentary material, Joseph's stirring spoken word poetry (I mean, this man can write and perform some poetry!), the dancing in multiple styles, from ballet to hip hop, the singing (which included Gates's and the others' performances of standards, blues songs, and original pieces), to create an embodied whole that suggested a larger vision.

The audience heading back to seats after the first part of the show

With each shift to a new season and city, a new cycle of life, came a new configuration of The Colored Museum, and at every point, even during the transitions, Joseph or his collaborators kept things going and flowing, though they also were not afraid to show the seams. Other elements of the multimedia performance included still and video projections on the back walls, judicious use of materials like seeds and bowls and water, lights and darkness, and taped music.  At one point, after the Harlem scenes, I was convinced that everyone had danced and sung themselves out, and if Joseph just decided to lie on the stage and Gates went silent but for a blues hum, I wouldn't have faulted them. But they kept moving towards the finale, and by the end, their aims had become clear. A reporter sitting next to me remarked at the end of the event that she would be reflecting on this performance for some time to come, and I had to agree.

red, black and Green: a blues

The red black and green subtext of the performance, i.e., blackness, as well as the blues, I think, were clear from the beginning, but I was curious to see how they would tackle the Green. The complexity of black--and brown, and working-class--people's relationship to the environment, natural, built, always constructed in social, economic and political terms, was complex. red black and Green: a blues made clear that any blanket pronouncements about a green approach that did not take into account historical and material conditions, the diverse and sometimes divergent perspectives of people who were often living in a state of multiple displacements, the rich connections between and across cultural circuits, was bound to fail. Joseph himself is Haitian-American, the son of an immigrant; in one scene, he portrayed himself talking to his son about the Black Panthers, and his and the landscape's relationship to them. His working through of their legacy for him and for his son, and for those who'd come after and might not know how they effected change and yet were not able to accomplish some of their goals, but left traces on those who came after, left traces in the landscape itself, marked it, was quite moving. His son, he suggested, was able to pick up the threads.

A scene from red, black and Green: a blues

The deft weaving of global and regional traditions, alongside critical and intellectual engagement, in embodied practice, was the highlight of this performance. Yet it never felt like a critique turned into art, or intellectualism for its own sake. The embodying of concepts, words, movements, gestures, voices, practices, of the space itself, occurred in a thrilling, unforgettable way. If red black Green: a blues comes through your city, don't miss it. I am looking forward to whatever these amazing artists come up with next.

Theaster Gates, after the show

Tommy Shepherd, after the show

Traci Tolmaire (on right), chatting with fans

Marc Bamuthi Joseph, at show's end

Remembering Piri Thomas

Piri Thomas

When I was growing up, the division of reading in my home went like this: my father read newspapers, and my mother read books. (Both read magazines.) My mother read all kinds of books, but especially novels, most of them romances after a certain point, but among her non-romance stash my favorites were novels by Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Sidney Sheldon, William Styron, and Kyle Onstott. Roots, by Alex Haley, whom my mother says is a paternal relative of mine, made its appearance around the time of the famous miniseries, but I don't recall my father picking it up, and I didn't touch it until several years later, so initially annoyed was I by (mostly white) classmates who took glee in calling me "racines" (roots, in French, one of the two foreign languages I had to study in 7th grade), which rhymed with my last name, and then was truncated to "Rasss." (Eventually I took it in stride, as I did other witty permutations on my name.) Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I did occasionally peek at based on my fascination with its eponymous subject, also sat on the living room bookshelf. There were, however, a few books other than the Bible that I knew my father periodically read at some point read, and of them, three gravitated from living room to the top of his bureau and back. Those were Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice; Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land; and Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets.

The former always stands out for me because of Eldridge Cleaver's handsome, striking face on the cover, and its poetic title. I would sometimes pick the book up and stare it, and then read the back flap and say to myself, this is one of those men's books, black men's books, a book about the 1960s and early 1970s and all the things that had gone down then, that this survivor had bravely written about.  The cover image and title together exuded a ferocity and frustration that I recognized in my father, in older male relatives and other black men near my father's age. I didn't read the book, though, because I thought of it as one of my father's books, something I shouldn't be reading--though I had no hesitation in reading Walker, or Baldwin, or Onstott--and didn't. I felt similarly about Brown's. The same was true of Thomas's book, which though also there in the house I didn't crack; its title alone was a warning: I may have originally assumed those "mean streets" were somewhere in St. Louis, or if not there, Chicago or some similar Midwestern city, until I read the book's back cover and saw that Thomas was writing about "Spanish Harlem," which I knew, because of the "Harlem," meant New York City and black people, though I had no concept of where in New York Harlem or Spanish Harlem for that matter was. But the back cover write-up suggested that the story the novel's pages contained was a harsh one, a man's story, and since this was one of my father's books and actually did appear to be read from time to time, I did no more than glance at it and try, when I had picked it up, to make sure it lay exactly where I had found it lest he notice that it had been disturbed even an inch.

I finally read Down These Mean Streets when I was in college, not as part of the curriculum of any course but because I was trying to read all kinds of things I felt I should be reading or have read (like Roots, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X), as opposed to things I'd been assigned to read in junior high and high school (Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lysistrata, Le noeud de vipères) or out of my own unclassifiable interests (Teach Yourself Sanskrit, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ulysses, Annie Allen) or as part of my college syllabi (Harmonium, Tender Buttons, The Conquest of New Spain, Ariel). As I proceeded through Thomas's account of his early life and youth as a Puerto Rican-Cuban (born Juan Pedro Tomás, in 1928) in Depression era and post-war America, I glimpsed what my father might have seen in the book, the common points despite their different heritages, backgrounds and experiences. My father was not from El Barrio; my father, as far as I knew, could not speak more than a few words of Spanish; my father never went to jail on drug charges. But Thomas's story of struggling to find his place in a city, a society and a world that had little interest in or place for him; his journey, as a latino man of African descent (among other ancestries), from the ghetto, to finding and asserting his presence and voice, against and through multiple invisibilities; his narrative of becoming a man, which was also at its core a narrative of becoming and being, I could see spoke directly to my father, as Haley/Malcolm X's, Brown's and Eldridge Cleaver's books did, and it spoke immediately to me. Thomas's love of books, of libraries, of the power of being able to travel to other places through literary texts, spoke even more directly to my mind and soul.

Thomas at University
of Chicago, delivering
a flow, 1969

Down These Mean Streets, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1967, is now a classic. Raw, poetic, sometimes infuriating, sometimes shocking, but always enthralling, Thomas's autobiographical novel tackled, among its many themes, the racial and ethnic diversity and attendant tensions both within and outside latino communities, a focus that many subsequent writers and scholars have picked up, but which the contemporary mainstream US media still cannot fully grasp or comprehend.  Its portrait of Spanish Harlem was also different from some of the idealized depictions that had preceded it (cf. West Side Story), and inspired many subsequent writers, latino and non-latino, to write their own stories. Thomas became quite famous for this book, to which he published a sequel, 7 Long Times (Arte Público, 1994). He also released other works, such as Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (Doubleday, 1972) and Stories From El Barrio (Freedom Voices, 2005)  He was also a poet, and recorded and issued CDs of his poetry, performed in a style he called flow, akin to rap's precursors such as the spoken-word poetry and songs of Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Felipe Luciano, Lou Rawls, and Oscar Brown, Jr.  His CDs were Sounds of the Streets and No Mo' Barrio Blues. He wrote and talked with young people all over the country about his own experiences, about being a Puerto Rican and latino in this country, about the history of Puerto Rico/Borinquen, about being a convict and an ex-con and the role that race and ethnicity play in the US penal system, about challenging the social logic and law of racism, whose effects he and many millions of others have suffered since this country's earliest days, and above all, about the necessity of "unity," a word he used when he spoke to young people, which is to say about finding commonalities and connections amid, across and despite differences.

Piri Thomas's vital voice left us yesterday, October 17, 2011, but it is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. We still have his words, in text and CD form, online and on libraries shelves, and, as I remember growing up, on bookshelves and bureaus. His vision and wisdom, captured in his novel, lives on and endures--vivirán y durarán--in heads, in hearts, in souls.

Harlem Book Fair, 2011

Today C and I headed up to Harlem to attend the annual Harlem Book Fair (HBF).  Sponsored by QBR: The Black Book Review and located along several blocks of 135th Street near the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at Malcolm X Boulevard, HB brings together publishers of all sizes, from major houses to single-volume self-published authors; readers from across the New York area; and arts and crafts vendors.  It includes panels inside the Schomburg building, panels at the nearby Countee Cullen Branch of the NYPL, workshops at the Thurgood Marshall Academy, and outdoor readings and performances, including a number geared specifically towards children. Particularly noteworthy in my opinion was this year's HBF Digital Village Outdoor Stage, which featured a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) E-Book Party. Though we were there, we were busy browsing the tables, so we missed it, but I had brought along my iPad just in case....

I've been attending the book fair for many years now, having participated in readings and panel discussions in the past, and this year's outdoor market portion of the fair appeared to be the smallest in terms of vendors' booths that I can remember. There seemed to be fewer total booths than in previous years and fewer booths by the bigger New York-based publishing houses (though Penguin, one of the sponsors, held a prime location) and bookstores, with the outdoor fair taking up only two long blocks instead of three as it had in the past. I chalked this up to the poor economy and the changing publishing and bookselling industries; this week Borders Group went under.  Perhaps it was the 102F heat, but there also appeared to be fewer people milling about as well.  Nevertheless, the authors and booksellers who were present were to talk about and sell their work, and some smaller publishers offered ample catalogues and backlists suggesting they were beating or at least staying ahead of the economic sharks. In general I found invigorating to see the enthusiasm in and for black writing and publishing; so often at mainstream writing-related events in New York or elsewhere in the US, except perhaps in Atlanta, black authors, readers, and publishers remain an afterthought, and the Harlem Book Fair always serves as a counterweight to this.

That said, the books on sale mostly appeared to fall into several distinct categories--popular black street and prison fiction, redemption narratives, romances, children's books (including many written as comics or in graphic format), and self-help and financial-help books--that were less diverse than in previous years. I saw fewer books of poetry, history, politics and political philosophy, creative nonfiction and journalism, economics, and the visual and performing arts. I also noted fewer graphic novels and comics, and fewer texts dealing with LGBTQ topics. There also appeared to be a gulf between books published by the big and mid-sized presses, in all genres, and self-published or small-press works. Works by most of the black poets and fiction writers, and by nearly all the black academics I know, were nowhere on display, thus giving attendees only a partial view of the rich array of books published by black authors or on black topics out there.

We did not attend any of the panels this year, but they looked to be as engaging as they usually are, and ranged from discussions of Barack Obama's first few years to contemporary Black British writing. Given how diverse the black and non-black communities are in Harlem and how Black America continues to diversify, I was also surprised by the paucity, except among the arts vendors, of more examples of this. Perhaps it's just my misperception, but in previous years there seemed to be more books focusing on or by African authors and topics.  With the large Latino population, especially Afrolatinos, living in or neighboring areas of Manhattan and the Bronx, I was also surprised there were not more Spanish-language books and events.  Perhaps as Harlem and surrounding areas continue to diversify, this will change too. So perhaps will the types of publishers who are present, and perhaps there will be a larger e-book and digital presence in the future; simulcasting and streaming some of the events so that they're available to attendees with digital devices might be a great addition to consider for next year.

Some photographs of the event:

Dr. Julianne Malveaux, about to sign her new book

Poet and fiction writer G. Winston James

Author and activist Dr. Heru Kuti

Ericka Williams's A Woman Scorned

Speakers entertaining and informing young readers at the Youth Tent

Author Alterick Gaston

Sabrina Carter of Baby Ellington and Jerry Craft of Mama's Boys

Geoffrey McClanahan's booth

LeRoy Dukes, shaking a fan's hand

Kontrena Clark, in a wedding dress, to promote her book (it got me to stop and photograph her!)

Ronald Richardson with some of his work

Angelic Script Publishing's table
 
Artist Dred-Scott Keyes