writers

2Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

SOCIAL JUSTICE

Black Writers And Journalists Have Wielded Punctuation In Their Activism – Here’s How

Eurie Dahn, The College of Saint Rose Using punctuation and capitalization as a form of protest doesn’t exactly scream radicalism. But in debates over racial justice, punctuation can carry a lot of weight. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, mainstream news organizations grappled with whether to capitalize the first letter of “black” when referring to Black people. Of course, writing “Black” was already common practice in activist circles. Eventually The Associated Press, The New York Times, USA Today and many other outlets declared that they, too, would capitalize that first letter. It turns out the push to capitalize “black” is only the most recent way Black writers and activists have pushed back against entrenched power through ostensibly bland elements of writing. As I...

The Final Novel Of One Of America’s Most Beloved Writers

A Penguin Classic The final novel of one of America’s most beloved writers—a tale of degeneration, corruption, and spiritual crisis In awarding John Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nobel committee stated that with The Winter of Our Discontent, he had “resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth, with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American.” Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous ...

Black Poets And Writers How They Gave A Voice To ‘Affrilachia’

Appalachia, in the popular imagination, stubbornly remains poor and white. Open a dictionary and you’ll see Appalachian described as a “native or inhabitant of Appalachia, especially one of predominantly Scotch-Irish, English, or German ancestry.” Read J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and you’ll enter a world that’s white, poor and uncultured, with few, if any, people of color. But as Black poets and scholars living in Appalachia, we know that this simplified portrayal obscures a world that is far more complex. It has always been a place filled with diverse inhabitants and endowed with a lush literary history. Black writers like Effie Waller Smith have been part of this cultural landscape as far back as the 19th century. Today, Black writers and poets continue to explore what it means to ...