![]() Their Facebook page shows that their last post was in 2014. Black Expressions Book Club helped me cement the concept of centering Blackness by default in my escapism.īlack Expressions Book Club closed its doors for good around late 2013. I no longer had to trick my brain into making characters, Black. ![]() Being able to have access to Black authors who also wrote mystery, sci-fi, and thrillers expanded my imagination. Lynn Harris, and other Black authors who write both fiction and nonfiction. The Black Expressions Book Club helped me build my perfect library. I was getting everything I wanted without having to endlessly search in a library or bookstore. If you didn’t select a title they would send you the editors’ favorites. They offered discounted books on upcoming books and they offered free books. The benefits of the book club were also perfect. Each page had a description of a book by a Black author as well as the book cover. ![]() It was sort of a zine catalog with approximately ten pages. I don’t know how they got my address or what I signed up for to get on the list, but it was the day that changed my life. ![]() One day I received a catalog in the mail. I thought I had won the lottery, and in a lot of ways, I did. I had the same joy for Black Expressions Book Club as I had for those music club memberships that came with ten CDs or cassette tapes for 99¢. But all of that changed for me when I discovered the Black Expression Book Club. Thinking about all the hours I spent in a bookstore hoping to find some Black literature was frustrating. Of course, there were times when I was sad. Even though some of the Black bookstores I visited weren’t big stores or didn’t have wall-to-wall books, it was the experience that made me go back for more literary treasures. It was better than the libraries and the mainstream bookstores as far as selections were concerned. At the time, the local Black bookstores featured a lot of nonfiction and books that were popular in the mainstream. When I discovered local Black bookstores, my options opened up, but my heart was always broken because the Black-owned bookstores I had access to at the time were closing. Looking back now, I was decolonizing my bookshelves before they had a name. I would make a beeline to the back of the bookstores or to the corners hoping to see the “African American” sign. However, most times it would just be a standalone display with maybe half a dozen books on display. If I were lucky, there would be an entire aisle of Black authors to chose from. At this time, bookstores had a small section for Black authors. Even if there were some good finds at the library, it wasn’t consistent. If I were lucky, I might see some at the library. The authors I was looking for weren’t always in my local grocery aisles. Alexander Library in Gentilly in June of 2020 and will run through September 2020.Even though hunting down all the Black books I could find became an obsession at one point, finding these books presented a challenge for me. The exhibit is scheduled to open at Dillard University’s Will. This exhibit will demonstrate that art education at Dillard was key to student resilience and empowerment in the face of segregation and the racial struggles of the 1930s through the 1970s. This exhibit will also highlight the many art programs, across genres, offered at the university between 19. WTW will focus on Dillard’s historic African American faculty, students and alumni who became prominent painters, musicians, writers, actors and directors among them Adella Gautier, Randolph Edmonds, Ted Shine Frederick Hall, Theodore Gilliam, and Brenda Osbey. The proposed public history project, Within These Walls (WTW), will be one component of a larger exhibit produced by Dillard University’s, Library Archives and Special Collections entitled The Star Burns Bright: History of Dillard’s Theatrical and Musical Arts, Faculty and Students.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |