Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

In honor of National Poetry Month, our selection for The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series  is   Good Woman:  Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980,   by Lucille Clifton .   A work that consists of her first four published collections and her 1976 memoir.  This combined manuscript was published in 1987 by BOA Editions. and is accessible through hoopladigital.com. Lucille Clifton was bo rn Thelma Lucille Sayles in 1936 and passed away in 2010. Clifton was an African- American poet, children’s book author, and educator from Buffalo ,   New York.   From 1979 to 1985 she was  Poet Laureate of Maryland and was nominated twice in the same year as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.   Although Lucille Clifton went on to publish six more manuscripts after   good woman , this particular book was chosen because it includes both her early poetry and her memoir.  The memoir,entitled   Generations ...

A Lesson Before Dying is set in a small Louisiana parrish where the people live on the same plantations that they had lived as slaves one hundred years before. The setting is 1948. The main characters are Jefferson, who gets sentenced to the electric chair, Grant Wiggins, the teacher who wishes he could escape from the parish, Reverend Ambrose, Grant's Aunt (Tante Lou), and Jefferson's godmother (Miss Emma), who convinces Grant to visit her godson in jail and to make a man out of him before he dies. Another character in the book is Vivian, a married (but working on a divorce) teacher who Grant loves. The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Feb. 22 with a discussion of this work by Ernest J. Gaines. We began the meeting by watching an eight minute video segment of Mr. Gaines being interviewed for the National Endowment for the Arts. There were sixteen of us, men and women, Black and white. A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 and won t...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued with a conversation about the book Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time and Mine . We met on Saturday Jan. 11 and again on Monday Jan. 13. This was our first time having the same book discussion on the Monday after for those who couldn't make it on Saturday. The book is a collection of 12 essays written during the course of many years that have recently been published together as a loosely comprised memoir. The book begins with the author being stabbed in 1994 and all the health problems that have been the result of the stabbing. She, along with six others in a coffee shop, was randomly attacked by a stranger. Over the years since this incident, the author has attempted to tell the story of race, specifically how the stabbing of a Black woman by a white man can be used as a metaphor for the violence suffered by her ancestors by whites in this country.  Dr. Bernard is a prolif...

The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Nov. 23, 2019. Nine of us met and all agreed that this was a hard book to digest. Even though we talked for nearly two hours, we didn't have time to comment on all of it. Laura said these "were such horror stories, there's an overall feeling of danger lurking." The eight stories collected in the book are: " The Rockpile " " The Outing " " The Man Child " " Previous Condition " " Sonny's Blues " " This Morning, This Evening, So Soon " " Come Out the Wilderness " " Going to Meet the Man " Most of the stories seem to end with no resolution at all. I think that we're used to stories having some kind of satisfying ending, which Baldwin does not give. The other thing is that when Baldwin used flashbacks, there wasn't really any transitional phrase to cue the reader that what's being describ...

     The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series continued on Saturday Oct. 5th. Thirteen of us met here at the Wilson Library for a lively discussion of Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves . This collection of essays gathered by Glory Edim features a wide array of writers describing the works that gave them a glimpse of themselves through literature.      Shelara started out by saying that although she didn't see herself in the literature she read at school, her parents made it their purpose to buy books in which she was reflected.       Kay said that when she was growing up she didn't recognize that she wasn't seeing herself in the stories she read, she related, " When I was growing up I think I was colorblind. I was going to the library three or four times a week. I loved the Dick and Jane books and later the white teenage romances. For me it has to be a good story. Of course now, I buy books...

The book scheduled for our August 17 th discussion is Dreamer by Charles Johnson. It takes place in Chicago during the summer of 1966 and Dr. Martin Luther King is staying in a disgusting tenement apartment to underlie the argument for affordable decent housing. Riots are going on all around and Dr. King is questioning as to whether his position of non-violence will work in a northern city. The parts of the book that are in italics are the inner thoughts of Dr. King, the pages in plain type is the story. The narrator is Matthew Bishop, a college dropout who joined the Movement as a record-keeper/note-taker, who says about himself: “I knew I left no lasting impression people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name, I had no outstanding features, no “best side,” as they say, to hold in profile…a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself…I was nobody.” Our discussion wasn’t well attended at...

Book Cover: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry  Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry  by Imani Perry Imani Perry being interviewed for PBS November 2018 1        Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American female author to have a play produced on Broadway. Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was also staged on Broadway, but had a much shorter run. 2        The title of her play:   A Raisin in the Sun is taken from a Langston Hughes poem with the line:            “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”        Lorraine’s own family had moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago. The neighborhood had a “restrictive covenant.” Ta Nehesi Coates discussed these covenants in the book We Were Eight Years in Power. White ...