'Silencer to the Heart While Jogging Through a Park''s ending makes reference to George Zimmerman's acquittal in the murder of Trayvon Martin. The political optics were a deep source of inspiration for the poem. After Sassing an Officer Who Assumed He'd Unlawfully Entered His Own Home' makes reference to the so-called 'Beer Summit' President Obama hosted at the White House for Gates, the officer, and Vice President Joe Biden. 'Silencer on the Arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. 'Shibboleth' was inspired by the West Wing episode bearing the same title. 'Plea to My Jealous Heart' was written after reading 'The Unceasing Prayer of Mount Athos: A Short Trip to the Edge' by Scott Cairns. 'Nocturne with Revelations & Militant Black Jesus' was inspired by Public Enemy's 1990 album, Fear of a Black Planet. 'In My 31st Year' begins with an epigraph from this 1994 2Pac interview. The poem makes reference to this Sandra Bland dash cam video. 'Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church' was incited by this image at the historic Atlanta, GA, house of worship formerly pastored by Dr. 'Blue Faces' was triggered by the Kendrick Lamar song bearing the same title, as well as the legendary Roots music video for 'What They Do.' To request a review copy, please be in touch with Leila Meglio at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. If you'd like a printed copy, be in touch! REVIEWSĬopies of Silencer are available for those interested in writing a review or conducting an interview. Please note: this is a digital copy of the EP that we are distributing for Silencer, and it only includes three of the six poems. 'For a while I was worried that I was being silenced, and so, as a kind of therapy, I began writing 'silencers'-poems that address gun violence and police brutality against African Americans in the news, without specifically invoking case details.'įlip through the Digital EP by clicking on the image below, or download a PDF here.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The persistent lies and historical revisionism of The Clansman and The Birth of a Nation did not go unopposed. Fractious groups descended from or inspired by the Klan persist to this day. Within a few years, chapters would spread throughout the country membership would escalate into the millions by the 1920s, and even expand into Canada at the height of the new Klan’s power and influence. A full decade later, the play and novel were adapted into an epic film, The Birth of the Nation (1915)-and on the night of its release, a second Ku Klux Klan was founded. That same year, it was adapted into a play and premiered on the stage. In 1905, Thomas Dixon Jr.’s novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan was published, the second in a trilogy of novels set in the South during the period of Reconstruction. And I think there are lots of readers, consumers of Genre of all backgrounds, who with relief are like, “finally…” So when we’re fortunate enough to get the chance to flip the script, to use those same tentacles to tell stories from different perspectives, we take it. What are you to do? Give up tentacles altogether? Now you got no tentacles to like, because the guy from way back was a serious ass? Thing is, marginalized people have been ingesting problematic things in SFF, from dark elves on down, and loving it through our gritted teeth-since forever. And some of the xenophobic meanings behind unknowable horrors lurking on the edge of human civilization give you serious pause.  Then you read Lovecraft and you’re like, uhhh, this guy is pretty problematic. I think whether one reads Lovecraft or not, his influence is all over genre-from television shows like Buffy to Marvel concepts of cosmic world-devouring beings like Galactus.

Brotherless night book