Best African American Essays:

Friends, Family

“Fired: Can a Friendship Really End For No Good Reason?” By Emily Bernard [email protected]

Emily Bernard is Associate Professor of English and ALANA U. S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. She received both her B. A. and her Ph. D. from the American Studies Department at Yale University. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African- American Research at Harvard University, and the Ford Foundation. Her personal essays have also appeared in Best American Essays and Best of Creative Non-Fiction. Her books include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten (2001), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship (2004), which was chosen by the New York Public Library for its Book for the Teen Age 2006 list. During the 2008-09 academic year, Professor Bernard is the James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Her upcoming book, White Shadows: Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, will be published by Yale University Press in 2009.

Gray Shawl By Walter Mosley [email protected]

Walter Mosley is one of the most versatile and admired writers in America today. He is the author of more than 29 critically acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins. His work has been translated into 21 languages and includes literary fiction, science fiction, political monographs, and a young adult novel. His short fiction has been widely published, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times magazine and the Nation, among other publications. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy and PEN America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in New York City.

Real Food By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie [email protected]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents. Chimamanda completed her secondary education at the University of Nigeria’s school, receiving several academic prizes. She went on to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University's Catholic medical students. She gained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and she went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University. At the moment, Chimamanda divides her time between Nigeria and the United States. She was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005-2006 academic year, and is now pursuing graduate work in the African Studies program at Yale University.

Entertainment, Sports, the Arts

Hip Hop Planet By James McBride [email protected]

James McBride is an award-winning writer and musician. He has been a staff writer for The Washington Post/, /People/ magazine, and /The Boston Globe/. His memoir and tribute to his mother, /The Color of Water/, spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, was published worldwide, and was the winner of the prestigious Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His novel "Miracle At St. Anna," is a major motion picture directed by American film icon Spike Lee. James also wrote the script for the $45 million film. As a composer, he won the American Music Theater Festival's Stephen Sondheim Award for his /pop musical Bobos, and has composed songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington, Jr., and Gary Burton. As a saxophonist, he has performed with Rachelle Farrell and with legendary jazz performer Little Jimmy Scott.

Writers Like Me By Martha Southgate [email protected]

Martha Southgate is the author of Third Girl from the Left/ which was published in paperback by Houghton Mifflin in September 2006. It won the Best Novel of the year award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her previous novel, The Fall of Rome, received the 2003 Alex Award from the American Library Association and was named one of the best novels of 2002 by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post. She is also the author of Another Way to Dance, which won the Coretta Scott King Genesis Award for Best First Novel. She received a 2002 New York Foundation for the Arts grant and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her non-fiction articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, O, Premiere and Essence. She now teaches in the Brooklyn College MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

Dances with Daffodils By Jamaica Kincaid [email protected]

Jamaica Kincaid's twisted quest for self began with her May 25, 1949 birth in Antigua. She was then christened Elaine Potter Richardson, but when she fled the island at the age of seventeen, she left her family as well as her name behind and entered North America as Jamaica Kincaid. Her life should seem familiar to those who know her heavily autobiographical work. She worked first in New York City as an au pair, for an upper class family much like the one pictured in Lucy. She left this work to study photography at the New School for Social Research and then went on to Franconia College in New Hampshire (but did not take a degree) before returning to New York. There she became a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, writing for nearly twenty years (1976-1995) before the arrival of new management convinced her to leave. She now resides in Vermont.

The Coincidental Cousins: A night out with artist Kara Walker By James Hannaham [email protected]

James Hannaham was born in the Bronx and raised in Yonkers, NY. He has a BA from Yale and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. He has written criticism for The Village Voice, Us Magazine, Spin, and Out, among others. A professor of creative writing at the Pratt Institute, his first novel, God Says No, will be published by McSweeney's Books in 2009.

Music: Bodies in Pain By Mark Anthony Neal [email protected]

MARK ANTHONY NEAL is the author of four books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003) and New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005). Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. A frequent commentator for National Public Radio’s News and Notes with Farai Chideya Neal also contributes to several on-line media outlets, including NewsOne.com. Neal’s blog “Critical Noir” appears at VibeMagazine.com. In the Fall of 2008, Neal will be a Visiting Scholar in the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania.

When Tyra met Naomi: Race, Fashion, and Rivalry By Hawa Allan [email protected]

Hawa Allan is a graduate of The University of Chicago and Columbia Law School. Her work has appeared in The New York Quarterly and Trace Magazine. She lives in New York City, where she practices law, and is currently at work on a book of short stories and a novel.

Dance in the Dark By Gerald Early

Modern-Day Mammy? By Jill Nelson [email protected]

Jill Nelson has been a working journalist for over twenty years. She is a graduate of the City College of New York and Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Essence, The Washington Post, The Nation, Ms., The Chicago Tribune and the Village Voice. Jill was a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine during its first years of existence, and was named Washington D.C. Journalist of the Year for her work there. Author of the best- selling memoir, Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience. In addition to writing, Jill worked as a professor of Journalism at the City College of New York from 1998 to 2003.

Broken Dreams By Michael A. Gonzales

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales is co-author of the groundbreaking music book Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (Random House, 1991). He has written cover stories for Vibe, Stop Smiling, XXL, The Source and Essence. Gonzales has penned articles and essays for The Vibe History of HipHop (Random House), Vibe HipHop Divas (Random House), Latina, Best Sex Writing 2005 (Cleis Press), Spin, Beats, Rhymes & Life (Harlem Moon) and The Village Voice. In addition, his short fiction has appeared in Trace, Colorlines, OneWorld, Proverbs for the People (Kensington), NY Press, Bronx Biannual (Akashic Books), Nat Creole.com, Darker Mask: Heroes from the Shadows (Tor Books), Brown Sugar 2: Great One Night Stands (Simon & Shuster) and the UK anthology Tell Tales IV (Peepal Tree Press Ltd). Gonzales also writes for the blogs Riffs & Revolutions.com and Blackadelicpop.com. Currently he lives in Brooklyn.

Sciences, Technology, Education

What IQ Doesn’t Tell You about Race By Malcolm Gladwell [email protected]

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of two books, "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference," (2000) and "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (2005), both of which were number one New York Times bestsellers. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper's New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.

Driving By Kenneth A. McClane [email protected]

Kenneth McClane is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature at . The author of seven poetry collections, including Take Five: Collected Poems, 1971-1986, he has also published a volume of personal essays, Walls: Essays 1985-1990. A new essay collection, Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History, will appear in 2009.

Part I. I Had a Dream By Bill Maxwell [email protected]

A native of Fort Lauderdale, Maxwell was reared in a migrant farming family. After a short time in college and the U.S. Marine Corps, he returned to school. During his college years, he worked as an urban organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and wrote for several civil rights publications. He first began teaching college English in 1973 at Kennedy-King College in Chicago and continued to teach for 18 years. Before joining the Times, Maxwell spent six years writing a weekly column for the Gainesville Sun and the New York Times syndicate. Before that, Maxwell was an investigative reporter for the Fort Pierce Tribune in Fort Pierce, where he focused on labor and migrant farm worker affairs.

Part II. A Dream Lay Dying By Bill Maxwell

The Once and Future Promise By Bill Maxwell

Gay

Get out of My Closet By Benoit Denizet-Lewis [email protected]

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is a writer with the New York Times Magazine and the author of America Anonymous: Eight Addicts in Search of a Life. A former senior writer at Boston Magazine and fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation, his work has also appeared in Sports Illustrated, Details, Out, and others. He lives in Boston.

Girls to Men By Chloé A. Hilliard [email protected]

For the last seven years, Chloé A. Hilliard has been a music/entertainment journalist, writing for the Village Voice, Essence, Vibe, King, and The Source. A native of Brooklyn, Chloé holds a bachelor's degree in Journalism from New York University and certificate from the Columbia Publishing Course. Currently, she is a staff writer for The Village Voice, America's largest weekly newspaper. Since joining the staff she's chronicled lesbian thugs, BET's transformation and eminent domain in Brooklyn. Prior to the Voice, Chloé served as News Editor at The Source magazine for two years. There she focused on keeping Hip Hoppers abreast of politics, culture and trends. For her expertise on Hip Hop culture she's appeared on CNN Headline News, ABC News, Our World with Black Enterprise and local news broadcasts on ABC 7 and CW11.

Internationally Black

A Slow Emancipation By Kwame Anthony Appiah [email protected]

Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah was born in London (where his Ghanaian father was a law student) but moved as an infant to Ghana, where he grew up. Appiah was educated at the University Primary School at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi; at Ullenwood Manor, in Gloucestershire, and Port Regis and Bryanston Schools, in Dorset; and, finally, at Clare College, Cambridge University, in England, where he took both B.A. and Ph.D. degrees in the philosophy department. Kwame Anthony Appiah has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and was inducted in 2008 into the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Searching for Zion By Emily Raboteau [email protected]

Emily Raboteau is the author of a novel, The Professor's Daughter. She is at work on a book of creative nonfiction entitled Searching for Zion, about Exodus movements of the African diaspora.

Last Thoughts of an Iraq “Embed” By Brian Palmer

Brian Palmer is an independent journalist and filmmaker. He is making a video documentary titled "Full Disclosure" based on three embeds in Iraq with a US Marine infantry battalion. Palmer shot, wrote, and produced an Iraq segment for PBS’s "Now" in 2006. He has worked as a freelance field producer in Iraq for MTV’s "True Life" and in New York City for the Tribeca Film Festival. Palmer has written for Newsday, The Crisis, Huffington Post.com, Pixel Press.org, Fortune, The Village Voice, The New York Times Magazine, US News & World Report, and Entertainment Weekly. From 2000 to 2002, Palmer was an on-air correspondent for CNN. He was a staff writer at Fortune from 1998 to 2000, and Beijing bureau chief for US News & World Report for the two years prior to that. Palmer began his career in journalism as a fact-checker at The Village Voice.

An African’s Plea: No More ‘Saviors’ By Uzodinma Iweala [email protected]

Uzodinma Iweala was born to Nigerian parents in 1982 in Washington, DC. After attending St Albans School, he graduated from Harvard University in 2004 with a degree in English. His first novel, Beasts of No Nation (John Murray/HarperCollins), has been translated into eleven languages. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, among others.

We Are Americans Jerald Walker [email protected]

Jerald Walker is an Assistant Professor of English at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow and James A. Michener Fellow. “We Are Americans” is an excerpt from his memoir, A Place Like This, currently under contract with Random House (Bantam/Dell). Other excerpts have appeared in Best American Essays 2007, The Review, The Iowa Review, The North American Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Barcelona Review, and The New Delta Review.

Activism/Political thought

Jena, O.J., and the Jailing of Black America By Orlando Patterson [email protected]

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is a John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. His academic interests include the culture and practice of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; Caribbean underdevelopment; and the problems of black gender and familial relations. He is the author of five academic texts, including "Slavery and Social Death" (1982) and "Freedom in the Making of Western Culture," winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1991. The author of three novels, he has published widely as a public intellectual in journals of opinion and the national press, especially the New York Times, where he was recently a guest columnist.

One Nation…Under God? By Barack Obama

Barack Obama was born on August 4th, 1961, in Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. and Ann Dunham. Obama graduated from Columbia University in 1983, and moved to Chicago in 1985 to work for a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment. In 1991, Obama graduated from Harvard Law School where he was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. Obama is the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee alongside his running mate, Joe Biden.

American Without Americaness By John McWhorter [email protected]

John McWhorter earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. A Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, McWhorter writes and comments extensively on race, ethnicity and cultural issues for the Institute. He writes a regular column in the New York Sun and is also the author of the New York Times Best seller Losing the Race (Harper Perennial), and an anthology of race writings, Authentically Black (Gotham Books). McWhorter's book, Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (Gotham Books) has generated widespread acclaim.

Barack Obama By Michael Eric Dyson [email protected]

Michael Eric Dyson, named by Ebony as one of the hundred most influential black Americans, is the author of sixteen books, including Holler if You Hear Me, Is Bill Cosby Right? and I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. He is currently University Professor of Sociology at Georgetown University. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Standing Up for ‘Bad’ Words By Stephane Dunn [email protected]

Stephane Dunn, Ph.D, MFA, is currently an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Morehouse College. She has also taught at Ohio State University. A scholarly and creative writer, she specializes in film, popular culture, literature and African American studies. She is the author of articles, commentaries and the book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (University of Illinois Press 2008).

Debunking ‘Driving While Black’ Myth By Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. Dropping out of high school, he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University, he went on to receive his master's in economics from Columbia University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago. Sowell has published a large volume of writing including 28 books, as well as numerous articles and essays, which cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Currently, Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California.

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters By Andrew Sullivan [email protected]

Andrew Sullivan is one of the most popular bloggers and provocative social and political commentators today. An essayist for TIME magazine, a columnist for the Sunday Times of London and senior editor at The New Republic, he also is the editor of andrewsullivan.com, a daily destination for readers seeking informed commentary on international affairs, domestic politics, religion and faith, culture and more. The former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, Sullivan was the youngest editor in its history and was acknowledged for making the magazine more relevant to readers of his generation. He is known for pioneering coverage of gay rights, the Supreme Court and affirmative action and his acclaimed reporting and writing on the Bosnian War.

The High Ground By Stanley Crouch

Stanley Crouch writes essays, fiction, and journalism, for the theater and for film. He is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center and Crouch's highly regarded works include Considering Genius, the recent collection of Jazz Writings; Don't the Moon Look Lonesome, his jazz novel; and The Artificial White Man, Essays on Authenticity.