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Maleka

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Maleka is Currently Reading

Maleka is currently reading

Happy Land

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 07, 2026 06:03PM

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The Antidote

by Karen Russell (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 01, 2026 03:31AM

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Murder at Gulls Nest (Nora Breen Investigates, #1)

by Jess Kidd (Goodreads Author)

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Mar 29, 2026 05:49PM

See all 9 books that Maleka is reading…

“She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political--for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)”
― Bell Hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

tags: play, pleasure, toni-cade-bambara, writing

12 likes

“I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen.”
― Marlon James

tags: alice-walker, listening, men, men-and-women, secret, toni-morrison, understanding, women

66 likes

“starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

32 likes

“Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can't cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It's just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

tags: tiny-beautiful-things

763 likes

“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

123 likes

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People interested in progressive social change for advancing social justice and the environment. Exploring issues, ideas, solutions, organizing, metho ...more

Literary Fiction by People of Color — 13326 members — last activity Apr 29, 2026 08:32AM
This can include genre fiction that is literary (e.g. speculative fiction, historical fiction, etc.), as long as it's written by a person of color (Af ...more

¡ POETRY ! — 22532 members — last activity Apr 13, 2026 03:25PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more

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City Lights Books is a landmark independent bookstore and publisher that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics.