Last month legendary poet Sonia Sanchez won the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize —a $250,000 lifetime achievement honor— and NPR is taking a look back on her lasting influence in the world of poetry and beyond. “Part of Sanchez’s power comes from advocating for her people—and from blazing a trail for poets who came after her. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who now has five poetry collections and a novel, says she learned how to lean into her power through Sanchez. ‘I remember how Miss Sonia would close her eyes sometimes when she would read,’ Jeffers says, thinking of one of her earliest readings in front of a big crowd. ‘And so I closed my eyes and I felt something enter me. And when I opened my eyes, I wasn’t scared anymore.'”
Leaning Into Power with Sonia Sanchez
Amazon’s Best Books of 2015
Amazon has published its Top 100 books of 2015 list. Their favorite has already been hanging out in our Top Ten.
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Embracing Tackiness with Rax King
Rax King discusses her intimate and hilarious essay collection and defining tackiness as "utter unselfconscious sincerity."
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Another Place and Time
Edmund White considers writers’ obsession with New York City in the 1970s, with photography by Peter Hujar. As White puts it, that was “a place and a time in which, rich or poor, you were stuck together in the misery (and the freedom) of the place, where not even money could insulate you.”
Literary Street Art
Emily Smith discusses the place of zines in contemporary American politics, over at Ploughshares. As she puts it, “Zines, like street art, are allowed critical power through anonymity—a function newsstand periodicals simply can’t perform for the sake of reputation or the sacrifice of advertisers. In this way, zines are small-scale democracies.”
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Impeachment 101
“The purpose of this initiative, and this book, is to show everybody the actual definition of impeachment as set down by the Founding Fathers, and ask whether it applies to anything that is going on now.” Melville House books has discounted copies of A Citizen’s Guide to Impeachment, which can be sent to a member of Congress of the buyer’s choice. In the meantime, maybe you’d like to get to know the other presidents?
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The Southern Festival of Books
Last weekend The Southern Festival of Books took over Nashville. The latest installment of #LitBeat takes you to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s panel there, on the importance of studying–but not romanticizing–history.
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