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Books by Mary Weems
Public Education and the
Imagination-Intellect: I Speak from the Wound in My
Mouth /
Tampon Class
An Unmistakable Shade of Red &
The Obama Chronicles
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When I was a
girl
By Mary Weems
I used to believe:
the moon left the sky
at dawn like a worker on third shift
picking up the stars
the change in her pocket
going home to a man
waiting with breakfast on the universe
pee and babies came
from the same place
babies as rare as Black dolls
breast feeding the eating
of nipples by fathers
at midnight
I used to believe:
all children lived with roaches
had to be home when the streetlights
came on
electric alarm clocks
that made our street empty
like the corner bar after last call
Santa Claus was Black
drove a carriage with a drop top
Rudolph and his boys a reindeer
jazz combo gigging with Miles
in the off season
death was an option
a pick one out of three
after a really bad day
“This is Your Life”
a lever that opened
the door to the next room
they entered dressed in a red suit
bought for the occasion
I used to believe:
love was something every
body carried around like breath
giving and getting it back
as blood moves from the heart
to the pinky toes
I used to believe:
the Creator listened to everything
everybody thought
until I stood in our backyard bigger
than the world one morning
started calling the ancestors
out of the sky to talk
hate was a disease crazy
people caught who forgot
that one day they will be the ash
in a dustpan
swept by God.
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Mary E. Weems,
Ph.D. is an accomplished poet, playwright, author,
editor, performer, motivational speaker, and
imagination-intellect theorist. Weems has been widely
published in journals, anthologies, and several books
including
Public Education and the
Imagination-Intellect: I Speak from the Wound in My
Mouth (Lang, 2003), developed from her dissertation
which argues for imagination-intellectual development as
the primary goal of public education. She won the Wick
Chapbook Award for her collection in 1996, and in
1997 her play Another Way to Dance won the
Chilcote award for The Most Innovative Play by an Ohio
Playwright. Her most recent chapbook
Tampon Class
(Pavement Saw Press, 2005) is in its second printing.
Mary Weems currently teaches in the English and
Education departments at John Carroll University,
and works as a language-artist-scholar in k-12
classrooms, university settings and other venues through
her business Bringing Words to Life.
Contact Professor Weems,
mweems45@sbcglobal.net, for readings
and more information.
posted 26
January 2007
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 10
February 2012
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