In this month where the women in our world get more attention, I salute you and the women in my life for extraordinary impacts on this planet.
Category: Spirit & Health
Giving Thanks
All my dear readers, friends and fam, have a beautiful Thanksgiving! I'm grateful for you! Just picked apples recently... we're gonna get a nice pie, maybe at least two apple frittatas for breakfast and late night snacks. More later... #Thanksgiving2021 #Blessed #Grateful #Love
Hoppin’ John, Skippin’ Jenny and keepin’ tradition…
These traditions go on to honor those heroic Black Americans and keep their same spirit of drive, ambition and making do until freedom and prosperity.
“I Came To Chicago To Work”
Dear Readers: Rachel León interviewed me for Chicago Review of Books on my latest novel SPEAKING OF SUMMER, the writing life and working in Chicago. I’d forgotten how much we covered: the novel composition process, support (or the lack thereof) for mental health, inequities in approaches to men and women’s meditative literature, unsafety for women. Share, repost, comment, like and follow. Thank you!
Kalisha Buckhanon doesn’t have a smart phone. Her first advice to new writers is to get rid of it. She writes on an old desktop computer without internet for the same reason she likes being a writer in Chicago — it allows her to get work done.
And that’s lucky for us because her new novel, Speaking of Summer, is a dynamic and important story that will provoke needed conversations about the devastating effects of trauma and mental illness.
In the novel, Summer walks to the roof of the Harlem brownstone she shares with her twin sister and disappears into the cold winter night. The mysterious circumstances of her disappearance set up a compelling tale about safety and violence, mental health and trauma, and victim invisibility.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Kalisha Buckhanon over the phone. An edited transcript of our conversation appears below.
Rachel León: I…
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Tiffany Gholar Tells the Truth
Gholar's display of glorious art and life-giving paintings, completed across five years, come with grown woman commentary about what it took to see each piece through. In wisdom, she snakes the darkest corners of life- grief, breakups, economic peril- in a chronology of change and chaos where blank canvas was the steadiest hold.
Happy to share a Woman of Power, Develyn Biagas
Develyn Biagas: a longtime educator and youth advocate now working on her PhD, with a specialty focus area of African-American girls and the school to prison pipeline. She also works in young adult literature and plans to publish her first Young Adult novel soon. I am happy girls she works with now have someone like her to look up to.
“You are not gonna silence me.” -Senator Stephanie Flowers on racist Stand Your Ground “rights”
Emmett, Trayvon, Markeis, Kalief, Oscar, Tamir, Aiyana, Stephon, Botham, Sandra, Amadou, Eleanor, Terence, Philando, Alton, Walter, Sharmel, Miriam, Tony, Jordan, Rumain, Rekia, Laquan, Eric, Michael...