All tagged BIPOC author

Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Lost Journals of Sacajewea

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction

Certain stories resonate in history. Specific people become fascinating characters lodged in the minds and hearts of a nation; their feats become a part of culture. Yet, often these fictions fail to realistically reflect the history; over time characterizations and backgrounds shift. This is especially true for famous historical figures who left no written records, many of them women and people of color. Such has certainly been the case with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, particularly with regard to the young Shoshoni woman who accompanied them for most of their journey. Even the spelling of her name—Sacagawea (derived from Mandan for “Bird Woman”) or Sacajewea (from her native Shoshoni meaning “boat-launcher) is uncertain. And yet, she was a woman with a voice, even if written history fails to capture any of her actual words. Debra Magpie Earling’s The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (May 2023) provides her a voice and a story in a spectacularly crafted novel that provides Sacajewea with her own journals, in an answer of sorts of the famous Journals of Lewis and Clark.

Be Holding

Be Holding

Chris Mathers Jackson
Poetry, My List of Required Reads

Rarely does a book-length poem hold its reader as tenderly and intimately as Ross Gay’s Be Holding (2020) held me. I never would have thought I would encourage everyone I know to read an ode of sorts to basketball legend, Julius Erving (famously called Dr. J.), and yet here I sit, enthusiastically doing just that.

The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, My List of Required Reads

works that envision various possible experiences of enslavement and the Underground Railroad like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2017), provide modern Americans with ample food-for-thought when considering race relations, questions of reparations, and more. Whitehead’s novel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017 and the National Book Award, provides an alternate history of slavery in the American South, not in terms of downplaying its brutality, but by exploring various means of dealing with its consequence.

Red at the Bone

Red at the Bone

Chris Mathers Jackson
Contemporary Fiction, My List of Required Reads

Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep that has carries many more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa massacre of migration out of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future.