The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks
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The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.
The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Brooks poem. The poems are, in a way, secretly encoded to enable both a horizontal reading of the new poem and vertical reading down the right-hand margin of Brooks’s original. An array of writers—including Pulitzer Prize winners, T. S. Eliot Prize winners, National Book Award winners, and National Poet Laureates—have written poems for this anthology.
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Washington Independent Review of Books
"It’s not enough for noir to be dark. It’s got to be bad-ass. Its words, its decaying and horrible beauty have got to hit you like a spiked heel dragged from your guts to your gullet. It’s got to twist the hot knife of passion in that soft space right below your belly while pumping bullets into your heart. It’s got to make you bleed. Akashic Books’ latest in their noir series, Staten Island Noir features some dusky and drop-dead gorgeous gems (emphasis on the dead) that do just that.” — Grub Street Daily
Staten Island Noir
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In 2004, Akashic Books launched a series of noir anthologies with each installment focusing on a different locale. In addition, each book’s editor must have some connection to the city. The Staten Island edition features stories by Bill Loehfelm, S.J. Rozan, Ted Anthony, Todd Craig, Ashley Dawson, Bruce DeSilva, Louisa Ermelino, Binnie Kirshenbaum, Michael Largo, Mike Penncavage, Linda Nieves-Powell, editor Patricia Smith, Shay Youngblood, and Edward Joyce.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY PATRICIA SMITH
“There’s crime here. Good crime. Mystery. Dark, scary stuff. Big crime. The noir kind, without a good guy in sight. Just scan the headlines: Skeleton in Staten Island Basement Points to Unsolved Murder; Staten Island Man Commits Murder after Victim Had Spit in Wife’s Face. Then there’s the haunted Kreischer mansion on Arthur Kill Road. Mob Wives, for Chrissakes, with all that squalling, hair-pulling, and Botox. A recent spate of hate crimes against blacks, Mexicans, Muslims. Mist-shrouded abandoned psychiatric hospitals. Guys named Eddie. Underground caverns. Willowbrook. The ghostly ship graveyard. The legend of Cropsey. That rolling landfill and all those secrets buried beneath it. Even the one movie that was named after the borough got it exactly right. Here’s the synopsis: A Staten Island mob boss Parmie is robbed by septic tank cleaner Sully who has a pal Jasper, a deaf deli employee moonlighting as a corpse chopper . . . That’s a damned sunshiny day on the island.”
“When They Are Done with Us” by Patricia Smith was selected for inclusion in The Best American Mystery Stories 2013, edited by Otto Penzler and Lisa Scottoline.
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A riveting narrative history of America, from the 1607 landing in Jamestown to the brink of the Civil War, Africans in America tells the shared history of Africans and Europeans as seen through the lens of slavery. It is told from the point of view of the Africans who arrived in shackles and endured the terrible dichotomy of this new land founded on the ideal of liberty but dedicated to the perpetuation of slavery. Meticulously researched, this book weaves together the experiences of the colonists, slaves, free and fugitive blacks, and abolitionists to present an utterly original document, a startling and moving drama of the effects of slavery and racism on our conflicted national identity. The result transcends history as we were taught it and transforms the way we see our past.
Crowns: My Hair, My Soul, My Freedom: Photographs by Sandro Miller
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A photographic panorama of the creativity and variety of Black women's hairstyles
In Crowns: My Hair, My Soul, My Freedom American photographer Sandro Miller (born 1958) celebrates the social endurance, cultural heritage and self-expression of Black women through their hairstyles. In this series of portraits, each subject is posed in front of either a strikingly black or vibrant geometric background that serves to highlight the models’ skin tones and accentuates their ultra-stylized hair, whether a halo of bright gold curls or crimson locks swept into an elegant bun. Each image is based on the relevant model’s “hair story” and pays homage to her personal fashion sense, documenting the many unspoken ways in which Black women assert their autonomy through their physical appearance. In this project, Miller seeks to recognize and honor Black women’s creativity and beauty while celebrating their social endurance and cultural memory at the same time.