My internship with Campus Progress  gave me the opportunity to meet one of HU’s illustrious alumna (and also introduced me to my newest inspiration as a writer). And If you haven’t picked up The Warmth of Other Suns, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Warmth is a Roots-like epic that honors the Great Migration as an underapperciated moment in American history that still affects us today.

Here is my interviw with Ms. Wilkerson (for CP’s “Five Minutes With…” Q&A feature): Continue reading →

“Her bookish life commenced at this time. She read anything that was printed that came her way and a great deal came her way…From her eight year, when she absorbed Shakespeare…[she] used to worry lest in a few years more she would have read everything and there would be nothing unread to read…”

– Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of  Alice B. Toklas ’33 (p. 74)

Gertrude Stein is an undeniable iconoclast in literary history – and arguably, Stein’s experimental “novels” (if one could call her prose poetry such) are unrivaled.

But Stein’s fear of reading all the books in the world is a bibliophile’s nightmare…that will never happen (unless the firemen from Fahrenheit 451 step out of pages and into reality).

Continue reading →