Month: March 2023

A Romance Salon: American Royalty

Tracey Livesay’s steamy rom-com American Royalty is the first in a new series inspired by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s real-life love story. Rapper Danielle “Duchess” Nelson turns the palace upside down when she falls for reclusive Prince Jameson. Livesay will discuss her work, answer questions, and sign copies at this informal salon. March 23, 11am, Central Library and virtual

Deaf Utopia with Nyle DiMarco

Is there anything Nyle DiMarco can’t do? The deaf activist’s smoldering good looks and killer dance moves earned him first place on “America’s Next Top Model” and “Dancing with the Stars.” And with the release of Deaf Utopia: A Memoir—and a Love Letter to a Way of Life, he’s a New York Times best­selling author too. In conversation with Wawa Snipe. March 24, 2pm, The Paramount Theater

No Ordinary Crimes: A Thriller Hour

Whodunit—the vigilante anti-hero, the cartel hitman, or a group of women assassins celebrating early retirement? Find out when E.A. Aymar, Gabino Iglesias, and Deanna Raybourn discuss their respective thrillers: No Home for Killers, The Devil Takes You Home, and Killers of a Certain Age. March 25, 11am, Central Library

Newbery Authors Panel

Local author Andrea Beatriz Arango, whose Iveliz Explains It All earned a 2023 Newbery Honor award, is joined by fellow Newbery medalist Meg Medina, author of Merci Suárez Plays
It Cool, to talk about writing books they wish were on shelves when they were in middle school. March 25, 12:30pm, Central Library

Crowns & Claws: Coming of Age in YA Fantasy Fiction

Debut authors Emily Thiede and Andrew Joseph White join local educator Amber Loyacano to discuss Thiede’s This Vicious Grace, which follows Alessa as she balances saving her home, finding love, and harnessing her power, and White’s Hell Followed With Us, about trans teen Benji, who finds refuge in a LGBTQ+ center in a post-apocalyptic world. March 25, 4pm, New Dominion Bookshop and virtual

As a youth, George Floyd dreamed of being a Supreme Court justice, a professional athlete, a rap star. 

Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa document those dreams and the impact of systemic racism on Floyd’s life in their book, His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice. They’ll be in Charlottesville to talk about it at this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book.

The book came out of an October 2020 six-part series in the Post. The picture of Floyd that emerged from the series and Samuels and Olorunnipa’s year of reporting “is that of a man facing extraordinary struggles with hope and optimism, a man who managed to do in death what he so desperately wanted to achieve in life: change the world,” they write.

Much of Floyd’s experience as a Black man in America resonates with Samuels. “The biggest example was the idea that if he encountered a stranger, people would often assume the worst,” says Samuels. “I think that feeling is something that resonates with lots of Black people, particularly Black men.” They exist in a world of constant fear that they might be killed, “more specifically by a police officer,” he says. 

And the biggest difference between Floyd and Samuels’ experiences as Black men? “I did not encounter [former Minneapolis police officer] Derek Chauvin on May 25th,” says Samuels.

The writers found surprises in learning about Floyd’s life and getting inside his head when he wasn’t there to be interviewed. He left letters, poems, and raps he’d written. “Obviously he was a creative guy,” says Samuels. Floyd wondered why his life was not better and often blamed himself. “I don’t think people would assume he was so reflective.”

Another surprise was learning Floyd was reading and writing at grade level in the third grade, when he aspired to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court after a lesson on Thurgood Marshall. Educators say third-grade reading levels define how far one goes academically. “That really begs the question,” says Samuels, “‘What happened?’”

The authors were amazed to learn that Floyd’s great-great-grandfather, Hillery Thomas Stewart, born enslaved, was one of the wealthiest Black landowners in the South by 1870, and owned 500 acres in Harnett County, North Carolina—until Jim Crow-era white businessmen and officials stripped the illiterate Stewart of his holdings through complex, fraudulent financial instruments and tax auctions. 

The family lost its land in a single generation, says Samuels. Research proved the story “a lot more terrifying than what the family said.” 

With the January 7 police beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, many wonder whether anything has changed since Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck. Samuels sees a lot of changes stemming from the widest protest movement in the history of this country.

“At least 16 states have banned no-knock raids or chokeholds as a direct line to the movement we saw with George Floyd’s death,” he says. Greater, immediate accountability occurred in Nichols’ death, with the five accused police officers fired even before the videos were released publicly, he adds.

Other changes aren’t so great—or are nonexistent. Federal police reform fizzled on Capitol Hill. When Samuels and Olorunnipa started writing, the books on racism that people said everyone should read are now ones people say should be banned, notes Samuels. 

And in 2020, it seemed many were ready to have robust discussions about the fuller truths of this country’s history and its relationship with systemic racism. Now, “those are really uncomfortable questions for a host of people,” says Samuels. “You can see that with what is going on in Florida. I think there’s a real heightened challenge in this country on how we should handle and present our history and what we should learn from these moments.”

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa will appear at the National Book Foundation Presents: An Afternoon with the National Book Awards at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Saturday, March 25.

The poems in John Keene’s latest collection, Punks: New & Selected Poems, span three decades, saturated with the desire, loss, and reflections of a Black gay man who lived through the early days of the AIDS epidemic and continues to navigate our contemporary traumas and tragedies.

Keene received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry for Punks, among other honors. A Cave Canem and MacArthur fellow, as well as a respected literary translator, he is perhaps best known for his fiction, including Counternarratives, his 2015 collection of short stories, where his acute appreciation for linguistics mixes with a honed ability to inhabit history—qualities that are on full display in Punks as well. 

Divided into seven sections, Punks covers a breadth of eras and emotive ranges, from the poems in “Playland”—many of which were originally published in a 2016 chapbook by the same name—which evoke G&Ts in gay bars with throbbing beats, celebrating the embodied joy that we experience in life, to sections that commemorate and mourn the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting, the Black men and women who continue to die at the hands of U.S. police, and the people whose lives were lost early in the HIV/AIDS epidemic, to name a few.  

The book’s eponymous poem appears about halfway through, dedicated “after and for Martin Wong,” the queer Chinese American painter best known for his paintings of the Lower East Side and Chinatown in the 1980s, who was lost in 1999 to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Keene’s poem is written in all capital letters, echoing a style Wong used in artist statements, at once conjuring his paintings and witnessing the isolation, confusion, and stigma that surrounded the death of so many (but especially other gay men) before much was known about HIV/AIDS:  

GREW UP TEETHING ON JADE GREENER 
THAN CREME

DE MENTHE STILL STUCK HERE
IN THE HOSPITAL IN

ISOLATION BECAUSE THEY THINK
I MIGHT HAVE TB I

NEEDED A VACATION ANYWAY MAYBE YOU CAN COME

VISIT ME THEY ARE ACTING LIKE
I AM RADIOACTIVE 

In “Underground,” Keene bears witness to “a system underwritten in blood,” drawing a line between the civil rights movement and a too-familiar encounter between a Black man and police, invoking legacies of trauma: 

Life at the end 
of the world.
Waiting, exhaling. 
There was no gun on the ground 
beside him. 
Train your eyes on the black
space behind them.

In “Pulse,” Keene’s approach is more of a collection of snapshots, giving voice to those murdered and wounded on June 12, 2016, in Orlando, Florida, through details like these:

We are the bitter beer, fizzy soda
and sweet cocktail.

We are the chairs rearranged to open
the floor. 

We are the sweaty brows,
the half-hidden tears. 

We are the gleam of smartphone screens. 

We are the small talk, the banter,
the laughter. 

We are the claps and the clap backs. 

Indeed, at times, the collection reads like a eulogy, referencing and dedicating works to countless artists and musicians—including jazz legends John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, and others—celebrating their influence while mourning their absence. As a whole, Punks is a wonder, balancing the joy and the pain of life through a chorus of perspectives, as well as an improvisational energy that is grounded in formal curiosity and playfulness, even when tackling the darkest moments of our modern time.

John Keene will appear at the National Book Foundation Presents: An Afternoon with the National Book Awards at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on Saturday, March 25.