Nazaré is out! “Everything begins and ends in the sea.” Nazaré: the great wave. Kin, an orphan scavenger in the Fishing Village with No Name, finds a stranded whale on the beach and tries to return it to the ocean. His efforts attract the attention of Mayor Matanza and his bloodthirsty police, the Tonto Macoute,…
“The Guitar” – play to premiere in Gaza, Palestine
My short play “The Guitar” premieres in Gaza, Palestine on Friday July 30, 2021. The production has been organized by The Hands Up Project, a wonderful coalition of teachers, students, activists, and creatives, whose mission is thus: The Hands Up Project is committed to social justice, global citizenship, and freedom of expression, and upholds the…
Southwest Word Fiesta 2021
Southwest Word Fiesta will be a hybrid event this year, with most sessions held through Zoom, and a few face-to-face in Silver City, New Mexico, USA. We have a star-studded lineup led by writer/activist Rick Bass. Rick has written around twenty-five books of outstanding quality, both fiction and non-fiction. He is joined by a whole…
The End of Hunger? A Great Writer Reviews the Evidence
Humans have been hungry for a long time. The 4,000-year-old tomb of Ankhtifi holds the inscription “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to such a degree that everyone had come to eating their children.” The traces of our ancient hunger are left in Paleolithic skeletons: a rough winter or a poor harvest shows…
New novel, “Nazaré”, to be published September 14, 2021 by PM Press
Nazaré tells the story of a peasants’ revolt in the polyglot city of Balaal. A homeless boy and the washerwoman who adopts him cobble together a ramshackle army of fishermen, shopkeepers, lapsed nuns, anarchist bats, and an itinerant camel in an attempt to end the reign of Balaal’s dictator. Looming over the disparate cast of…
A Black Polymath Writes the Resistance: Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? by Jesse McCarthy
In his introduction, Jesse McCarthy writes that the twenty essays in Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? are true to the word’s French etymology: essai. Essais are “attempts.” But in this outstanding collection, the pieces are more than this. They are experiments that audaciously integrate art, music, literature and politics, all seen through the…
Short story in “A Public Space”
A Happy New Year to all my friends and readers! My short story, “Nazaré,” has been published in the rather eminent literary journal A Public Space. The journal has been in print since 2006. It partners with the brilliant Graywolf Press, one of the best indies around, and publishes some excellent writers. Actually, one of…
Writing as the Practice of Freedom: Banned Books Week 2020
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses came out in 1988. He spent the next ten years in hiding. Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, didn’t approve of Rushdie’s portrayal of Mohamed, and pronounced a fatwah, a death sentence, on the author. The fatwah was eventually lifted after Khomeini’s death (although officially fatwahs can only…
Review of “Perdido: Sierra San Luis” by Michael P. Berman
When the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V asked Mexico’s conqueror, Hernan Cortes, what Mexico looked like, Cortes crumpled a piece of parchment, threw it on the floor, and said, “Mexico.” Mountains, bluffs, peaks and ridges. Five-hundred years later, Michael Berman, longtime photographer/adventurer and teller of the tale above, is trekking through the mountains of Sierra…
Black and Blue: The Uses of Anger
1. Nina In 1963, the singer Nina Simone was so angry she wanted to go out and kill somebody. The civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been murdered in June and four months later four little black girls died in the bombing of the Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Nina Simone’s husband and manager…
Two new pieces published in The Bored Friday Project: Volume 5
“The Bored Friday Project” is an independent journal of original artwork, photographs, poetry and prose collated and edited by Curtis Pink. Volume Five, which came out in July 2020, is dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement. It contains excellent work by the likes of Heather Steinmann, Matthew Leonard Brown, and Laura Ramnarace, and two…
Six Short Pieces for Jimmy Santiago Baca: a review of Baca’s “Laughing in the Light”
(Re)birth: Jimmy finds a new meaning for the word “sentence” When Jimmy Santiago Baca was in his early twenties and serving time in a high-security prison, a Good Samaritan from the outside world—Henry Gould—wrote to him. Gould ran a soup kitchen. His legs had been blown off during World War II, but his heart was…
JJ Amaworo Wilson, author 