Some scenes from ECBACC ’09, where Jeremy Love, he of the extra super excellent Bayou, was a big winner.
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If you’re a person of color who likes to read/watch sci-fi and/or fantasy, stand up and be counted.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the Harvard grad who is both Africa’s first female president and the most awesomely behatted lady east of Aretha Franklin at any given time, has written a memoir. This week, it’s reviewed in the New York Times Book Review.
This Child Will Be Great, reviewed by the New York Times’ own Helene Cooper, whom you may know from her role as the paper’s White House correspondent and the publication of her 2008 book about her own childhood in Liberia, tells how Johnson Sirleaf straddled Liberia’s complicated class divide on her way to the presidency.
Oh, and she tells the stories of her scary interactions with the power-hungry, intelligence-deficient certifiable nutjobs Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor.
When Charles Taylor invaded Liberia in 1989, Johnson Sirleaf met in the bush with this wide-eyed guerrilla, determining for herself, she says, that he was “not at all grounded in the very real consequences of the path upon which he had embarked.”
Ha. I’d say that’s a delicate way of putting it.
I’m thinking about putting this book on my library request list.
Liberia, as you’ll remember, was founded by freed American slaves, so the book also spends a lot of time on the complicated relationship between the two countries — which seems to involve a lot of wistful longing on the part of Liberians and little or no attention at all from Americans.
Johnson Sirleaf has been changing that, on what is clearly a conscious bid to raise Liberia’s profile in the West generally and in the U.S. specifically. Just last month, for instance, she appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Ellen Johnson Sirleaf | ||||
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*Photo of Johnson Sirleaf from the Center for Global Development
Farai Chideya is one of those women who seems so smart and with it that she almost intimidates me (I chickened out of introducing myself when I saw her wandering the halls by herself at a journalism conference a year or two ago). I was incredibly saddened when one of NPR’s last round of budget cuts swallowed her radio show, “News & Notes.”
Kiss the Sky is her first novel, about a young woman who is navigating love, life and music circa 2000.
The always-everywhere-at-once, always-connected conscious comic and vigilante pundit Baratunde Thurston, whom I had the pleasure to meet at South by Southwest Interactive, put this video together.

Happy Mother’s Day to all!
Today is a particularly special day for me because I am spending it with my beloved mother…and because my husband and I are expecting our first child early this fall.
Although I’ve basically spent all of 2009 in an exhausted haze due to the pregnancy, I’ve also been searching for — and in some cases, reintroducing myself to — some books about black mothers and children.
Here are a couple of the new-to-me things I’ve found, with quick ratings:
Since my parents found my name in a book of African names, I’m really eager to get a book of names. Among the ones I’m considering: African Names: Names from the African Continent for Children and Adults, by Julia Stewart, or Proud Heritage: 11001 Names for Your African-American Baby, by Elza Dunwiddle-Boyd.
And hey, if you’ve got any other recommendations on this subject or others that might be of interest to a more-than-slightly-anxious-(gulp! I can’t believe I’m saying this)-mom-to-be, I’m eagerly accepting suggestions.
*Photo from Black Soils. Eden Now.
If you’re in Harlem (sigh. I miss living in Harlem) on June 7, head to the AALBC.com Brownstone Gallery for wine, food and art for a good cause — Mosaic Literary Magazine and its programs.
The event is from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. at 64 West 119 St.
More details from Mosaic.
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