Look what I’ve had time to do for the first time in ages!
Diverse book news is still thinning on the ground, but because this is reality and not a trend, here’s some links to keep us all up to date;
- The first one is entirely selfish–I’ve updated the About Me page of this site to include a little bit more about my life as a writer, including a little bibliography of my work(with links!). If you’re curious about what I write outside of reviews and rants, go take a look. [Equal Opportunity Reader]
- Poet Leila Chatti, a biracial Tunisian-American writer who grew up in a religiously mixed home, has a very thoughtful take on writing while biracial that I learned quite a lot from. [Ploughshares]
- Jay-Z has donated half a million dollars to fund legal aid for teachers, librarians, and academics facing problems due to book bans. Good for him. [Black Enterprise]
- Speaking of book bans, I bought what may be the coolest anti-ban shirt ever from friend and online entrepreneur Crafty Kita. It’s the image for this post, and I love it. Also, suck it, book banners. [Crafty Kita]
- I’ve written before about how reading poetry by justice-impacted people has made me examine my empathy voids. Haitian-American poet Enzo Silon Surin is not, as far as I’m aware, formerly incarcerated, but his new collection examines the social frameworks that make this such a common distress in the Black American community. He elaborates on it all very gracefully in this interview. [The Common]
- The gamification aspect of Goodreads, Storygraph, and algorithmic sites and apps in general has never bothered me overmuch but I do have concerns for people who’ve had these things all their lives. Turns out they do too. [Shondaland]
- The Diverse Book Awards longlist is out and…wow. Y’all, I’m slipping, because I haven’t read a single one of these books. To the #tbr they go! [Locus]
- Henrietta Lacks, immortalized both biologically and literarily, has finally gotten her due. Her family has received financial compensation for the billions of dollars pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher Scientific has made since 1951, when they harvested Ms. Lacks’ cervical cancer cells. [AP News]
- Okay, last one–remember all the kerfluffle about Simon and Schuster potentially being bought by Penguin Random House and becoming an enormous Frankenpublisher with even fewer opportunities for fairness and creativity and many more avenues for exploitation and the constant flattening of diversity? Turns out that after that was struck down, Simon and Schuster has still been acquired…by a private equity firm that owns, among other things, Safeway, ToysRUs, and most of the band OneRepublic’s catalog. This will be…interesting. [Wall Street Journal]
That’s it for this week, fellow readers. As always, thanks for reading and if you want to throw a little support this way to keep the blog’s lights on(and enable more of these news posts) please visit the Equal Opportunity Bookshop, where every purchase earns us(me) a little change. Peace! Now go read something good!
Equal Opportunity Reader 