In the early 1980s when I studied choreography with Dr. Alma Hawkins at Santa Monica Community College, The Courage to Create by Rollo May was on the reading list for…
What impresses me most about the storytelling and the writing of God Help the Child is how carefully Ms. Morrison chooses when to reveal what needs to be revealed so we can begin to understand the inner motivation of the characters’ journeys.
I just finished reading James Jones’ Whistle, the final novel of his World War II trilogy. A couple of months ago, I read the second in the trilogy The Thin…
This memoir shines a light on what’s possible, and hidden inside her story is a map showing a way to accomplish one’s dream—even the most unlikely and impossible dream.
Recently 1984 by George Orwell popped into my mind, perhaps because I needed to understand what I was witnessing in the first months of 2017, or at least make an attempt to understand.
Terrible voting weather, remarked the presiding officer of polling station fourteen as he snapped shut his soaked umbrella and took off the raincoat that had proved of little use to…
“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.” As soon as I read this first sentence of Loving Day by Mat Johnson I sighed and…
Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq War and the author of The Stick Soldiers (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013). As he notes, poetry is "the most precise and powerful form of expression..."
This collection of poems is not light reading but it is necessary reading if we are to heal the wounds of war and shorten the divide in our country.
War Trash isn’t my favorite novel. Ha Jin isn’t my favorite writer. But the novel is important for me because it shows me a part of history I didn’t know.