Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

The following is Claudia Rankine reading from the poem "Making Room" from Citizen: An American Lyric. See pages 131-133.  "...where he goes the space follows him..." Below, Jason Reynolds reads from the beginning of Long Way Down  "if the blood inside you is on the inside of someone else you never want to see it on the outside of them..."

The book selected for the 2018 Big Read is Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. At 162 pages this book is dense!  Not necessarily dense with words, but dense with emotion. Of course, before reading it, I thought, Oh, a poetry book, it's pretty short so let's add another book of prose to read as well."  This is how we ended up with two books for the June 2nd discussion.  Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is the first work of poetry to become a New York Times bestseller for multiple weeks on the paperback nonfiction list. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, and was also a finalist for the ward in criticism, the first time in the history of those awards that a book was named a finalist in more than one category. Citizen is a genre-bending work of art combining lyric prose with visual art. This book examines racism in through specific examples of racism in everyday life (referred to as microaggressions)as well as the phys...

So in exchange for choosing Crowns: Black Women in Church Hats  for our April book discussion. The members of Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series were given passes for the play Crowns: the Musical.  According to NPR, "even before the book was finished, Marberry approached the artistic director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ about adapting if for the stage. From the more than 50 women in the book, playwright and director Regina Taylor created six composite characters. The things that I thought were lacking in the book: a story, a person who was not in church culture, a male,  allusions to modern life, were all in the play. Even though Ms. Taylor stayed true to the real women in the book, using some of their lines verbatim, having a young person from a big city descend on the set which takes place in Darlington, SC, adds another dimension to these women's stories. Because of Yolanda, the teen from Chicago, the women themselves eventually open up...

The Urban Life Experience Book discussion Series has been immersed in the outrage against racial injustice, mass incarceration and the killings of unarmed citizens by the police. Imagine how we responded when asked by the New Haven Free Public Library and the Long Wharf Theatre to read the book Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats. The book features black and white photos taken by Michael Cunningham. Journalist Craig Marberry provides the mini-bios of the women pictured. The group met on Saturday April 14 th and actually had one of the best discussions ever. The oral history provided in the women’s stories, although not so much concerned with criminal justice or race relations, was yet meaningful, providing another facet of African American culture. The forward was written by Maya Angelou, who asserted that “Truly the Civil rights Movement was begun In the Black Church.   She made the connection between African head coverings and African A...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series celebrated the birthday of Langston Hughes (which was Feb. 1, 1902) with a book discussion of any biography or autobiography of Hughes, followed by the film Hughes's Dream Harlem , which was fantastic. Eight people attended the discussion and 21 people enjoyed the film. 2002 DVD Hughes's Dream Harlem featured Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Talib Kweli, and others  I read a biography written for teens, Langston Hughes: the Harlem Renaissance by Maurice Wallace which was succinct and included all the pertinent facts. I then attempted to read the definitive biography written by Arnold Rampersad. I picked up Volume 2 of Rampersad's work, thinking I would get more information concerning Hughes' participation in the Civil Rights Movement ( or the curious lack of participation according to the Wallace book), however I really didn't get much more information at all. Our facilitator read...

Book Discussion of They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement by Wesley Lowery. On the day of our discussion, there was still snow on the ground from a major winter storm and it was only eleven degrees. In spite of the freezing weather and difficult driving conditions, four of us managed to meet.  The one criticism we all shared was the “jumping around in time” in an otherwise great book. Our facilitator stated that the purpose of the book was to explain how activism of this generation started, an accounting of how millennials got involved. Fortunately for us, one of our members had shared a podcast from the Enoch Pratt Free Public Library in Baltimore, MD. The podcast series is called Writers Live and the particular podcast featured Wesley Lowery recorded Mar. 7, 2017. http://www.prattlibrary.org/booksmedia/podcasts/index.aspx?id=6951 In the podcast, Mr. Lowery relates that the purpose of his book is to tell t...

We are reading They Can’t Kill Us All for discussion on Jan. 6, 2018.  We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates is our book to read for Black History Month! It’s a bestseller and getting a lot of praise.   Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward, is the winner of the National Book Award for fiction. It’s 304 pages long.  We should read this! Toni Morrison’s book, The Origin of Others is very short. Combining it with one of her novels seems like a good idea. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric has been chosen for the Big Read of 2018. It ‘s a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Because it’s short (and it’s a poetry book) I was thinking we’d read it with another book of verse: Jason Reynold’s Long Way Down. The Floating World is a novel about Hurricane Katrina and Jane Crow is a biography of Pauli Murray. It may be too long (512 pages!) The Talented Ribkins...