Mailbox Chronicles no. 6: “How to Be Drawn” – by Terrance Hayes; “Swear” – by Hakim Bellamy

African American poetry is undergoing a renaissance, with Tracy K. Smith, Claudia Rankine, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Gregory Pardlo recently publishing groundbreaking and prizewinning work. Terrance Hayes is another prize winner, having taken home the National Book Award for his 2010 collection Lighthead and garnered a MacArthur Genius Grant, to boot. His latest collection, How…

Mockingbird Alive

Fifty-five years after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee will release her second novel, Go Set a Watchman, in July 2015. The new novel, to be published by HarperCollins, is a sequel to Lee’s classic. The 88-year-old author, who now resides in an assisted living home in Alabama, wrote the follow-up in…

60 years of Howl-ing

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, *Ginsberg wrote his seminal poem “Howl” in 1955. It was utterly…

Obama makes e-books available to low income kids

Barack Obama has announced a plan to put $250 million worth of e-books into the hands of low income kids. With the help of all the major publishers, 10,000 e-books for children aged 4-14 will be made available via a free app developed by New York Public Library. This initiative marks a start on closing…