At Columbia Journalism Review, Serena Cho writes about how college newspapers are working to address systemic racism in the wake of the movement for Black Lives, often challenging traditional journalistic norms.
Yaa Gyasi talks to the Paris Review’s Langa Chinyoka about representing immigration experiences, toxic notions of Black respectability, and how her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, came to be. The story was inspired by a neuroscientist friend of the author’s: “Around the time that Homegoing came out, she was publishing a big paper that she was really proud of and I was also very proud of her but I couldn’t get through it. I just could not understand what I was reading, which was kind of a strange experience. And so I asked if I could shadow her in her lab one day and she said yes.”
Horror writer and historian Tananarive Due points out that Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a New York Times best-seller.
For Poynter, Sydney Bauer talks with Mina Brewer about The Atlantic’s use of his photo for a 2018 cover story about gender dysphoria that conflated his identity with the pronouns used in the headline and “pretty much outed” Brewer as trans to his family. “I think everyone involved in this story—from the decisions around art, to the editor who accepted the pitch or solicited the story, to the reporter who worked on the story—failed both the audience of The Atlantic and trans people,” noted Oliver-Ash Kleine, a founder of the Trans Journalists Association.
Marc Lamont Hill’s new book, We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest and Possibility, is available for pre-order from Haymarket Books.
On Tuesday, September 8th, Roxane Gay will discuss The Selected Works of Audre Lorde with Alexis De Veaux as part of Politics and Prose’s streaming live series. For more on the collection, see Gabrielle Bellot’s review in Bookforum’s fall issue.
