Zetta Elliott's Blog, page 108

Her Circle

Thanks to the women over at Her Circle Ezine for giving me a chance to contribute to their Writer's Life column.  Check out "Framing the Past," my meditation on the challenges of representing the trauma of the Middle Passage…

Love YA Lit

There's a great new YA site in the blogosphere—check out Em and Nora over at Love YA Lit.  Emily and I met at the Hudson Book Festival this past spring, and she was kind enough to interview me in advance of her review of Wish, which will go up next week…

This is an interesting blog that focuses on the history and experiences of black people in Europe.  This particular post only includes images of black men (Ignatius Sancho, below), but I've already got a novel in mind about African-descended w...

time travel: science vs. symbolism

I never took physics in high school, so the scientific possibility of time travel doesn't really interest me.  I recently wrote a guest post in which I tried to explain just why shifting time matters to a writer like me:

…the time-travel device enables me to recreate the jarring experience of dislocation that my ancestors endured.  Torn from their families and cultures, stripped of their languages and religions, and thrust into a violent, unjust, and confusing country, these survivors quite...

support prison libraries

Prisoners' Reading

Encouragement Project

" providing reading and educational materials to prisoners

through gifts to prison libraries"

P LEASE DO NOT GIVE US BOOKS THAT YOU WOULD NOT GIVE TO A FRIEND.  WE CAN ONLY USE BOOKS  THAT ARE CURRENT AND IN VERY GOOD CONDITION.  Our goal is to make reading appealing to incarcerated men and women who might not otherwise pick up a book.  We cannot use "old books."  In general, we request that you not give us books printed...

triangular road

People think Scorpios are evil, but there's a lot of nastiness in the world that WE did not create.  After being insulted yesterday, I fumed for a while and then lugged my laundry into the basement and immersed myself in Paule Marshall's memoir.  If you love black women's literature then you've likely read Brown Girl, Brownstones.  In Triangular Road, Marshall revisits that moment when she was an emerging author, finding her way forward with her radical 1960s peers and the sage advice of...

get ready for your close-up…

…because Amy Bodden Bowllan is asking folks to send her photos of their favorite book by an author of color.  If booksellers like Borders think there's no demand, let's prove them wrong and show just how much we enjoy books with diverse perspectives.  I just started Grace Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and was thrilled to find a profile of Ms. Lin over at Color Online–check it out!

I was *not* thrilled to hear that Ellen Hopkins was disinvited from a teen lit festival in Texas; it...

merci, Mariam!

Mariam and I met in 1997 when she came from Paris to spend a year at NYU.  Yesterday we sat in a cafe on campus and marveled at how much has changed—on campus, in our lives.  We've both lost our fathers; we both want a transnational life; we both cherish moments of solitude.  I spent last night listening to the amazing CDs Mariam gave me as a gift—Rokia Traore's Tchamantché (which means "balance") and Didi Bridgewater's Red Earth: a Malian Journey.  Can't get "Dounia" out of my mind…makes me ...

stuck

If I were trying to be poetic, I would say instead that I'm enthralled.  But stuck works—obsessed, fascinated, fixated.  I can't get this song/video out of my head, and I can't thank Shadra enough for posting it on Facebook earlier today.  Serendipity?  Or a sign…

Earlier this week Jenn on the Carl Brandon Society list forwarded this trailer for an interesting afrofuturism film called The Last Angel of History.  And it's very male, but visually impressive.  This video for "Going on" speaks to ...

Gnarls Barkley – Going OnUploaded by AtlanticRecords. – S...

Gnarls Barkley – Going On
Uploaded by AtlanticRecords. – See the latest featured music videos.

why I love librarians

One of the first things I remember seeing when I came to Brooklyn in 1993 was the stunning gold facade of the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library.  But the first library I actually visited was in Canarsie—it was around the corner from my stepmother's house, and since I didn't feel welcome there, I spent more and more time at that library.  I was an immigrant, I had no status, but I'm pretty sure they gave me a library card.  I may have used my father's card, but I'm almost positive ...