My Appearance on State of the Arts NJ

Last fall, Susan Wallner of the wonderful TV program State of the Arts New Jersey contacted me about possibly producing a short clip about my work and me. I am always a bit wary about such efforts, as I would always rather have my work do the speaking for me, but since there was a possibility that SOANJ would feature my students, teaching and Rutgers-Newark, I thought I'd go along with it. The filming occurred in early November, and again in late February, and I can say without hesitation that Susan and her crew were a pleasure to work with, from start to finish.

Many, many thanks to them and everyone at State of the Arts New Jersey who made this possible. Many thanks also to superb critic and writer Julian Lucas, and to Poet Laureate of the US, Princeton professor, poet extraordinaire, and my former Dark Room Collective compatriot Tracy K. Smith for their kind, insightful comments on my work and me. Also a very hearty thank you to my MFA students, who agreed to be filmed, and sparkled (as they always do) on camera, and to everyone at Rutgers-Newark who greenlighted the filming. 

I am so shy and self-conscious I could not initially bear to look at it (I needed but did not get a haircut before the February filming), but C told me it came out very well, and pointed out that Susan and her team had even threaded a Bob Cole tune through the video, a lovely touch, of course, and tribute to one of the artistic figures I explore in Counternarratives. The show aired last week, and though we've been DVRing the episodes and keeping an eye out for it, we also missed its debut airing! Here, for those who do not regularly watch State of the Arts New Jersey, is the short video. Enjoy!

Random Photo

This one is truly random, and I would have missed it had my friend Anthony Montgomery not called my attention to it. The lead-in: a few weeks ago the Daily Mail, as it's wont to do, posted an article on the death of a celebrity, Matthew Mellon (1964-2018), the banking heir and cryptocurrency billionaire, who had recently passed away after a struggle with addiction. Anthony must have scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the article, where he spotted the following photograph, which, it turns out, was one of the last Mellon posted on his Instagram account before he passed away. It shows him beside his close friend, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy (daughter of environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), who is hiding her face behind...well, you see! As I mentioned to C, my publishers, and others, you never know who's reading your work or where it might turn up.

A Few New Interviews

This summer, I had the pleasure of chatting in person with Madison McCartha, who is currently a student in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Madison had previously held conversations other writers, including the amazing Douglas Kearney and Rachel Galvin, to discuss topics under the rubric Polyphone: Interviews with Diasporic Poets. We ranged over all manner of things and people, and I really enjoyed meeting Madison and am looking forward to his work as it appears in the world. Recently the journal Full Stop published the interview, which you can find here. Many thanks to Madison for the excellent questions and thoughts, and to Full Stop for running this discussion.

Here's a snippet:

In an essay on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriett Blog, Ken Chen says he always finds himself “met with troubles [as] to how to fit something infinite like death energy of grief or the death energy of Empires within a box that is finite like a book of poems or a book of fiction.” I’m wondering what has been the difficulty for you in translating the sublime trauma of imperialism, as he calls it, and whether that process (of translation) expanded or complicated your thinking about it?

By all means. It’s extremely difficult, and part of the challenge is presenting it in a way that is comprehensible to people today. Because on one level, yes, we can try to imagine what it would be like to be a black soldier in a battle in the US Civil War. On the other hand, I think it’s quite difficult to ever imagine what that experience was like. I mean consider the multiple layers of precarity that that person was embodying, but also, at the same time, their extraordinary bravery: to put oneself in extraordinary danger, not just for one’s own home but so many others. What does that mean? What does such a radical practice of freedom look like? How do we depict it?

There are multiple ways. Creating scenes, and creating characters, to tap into emotions elusive to us and yet that we know intimately: that is a form of translation. That’s something art can actually do, that other forms of writing can’t, or not exactly. Moreover, there is the question of the larger canvas, of colonialism and empire: how does a fiction writer convey these larger systems and structures without didacting, without essentially writing an essay (though there are hybrid fictional-essay forms that would work well)? What does it mean to put pressure on the usual recourse to the individual, when what we need is this larger backdrop, which tends to go missing in so many of our public discussions?

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A few years back, perhaps shortly before Counternarratives was published, I met up with writer, scholar and activist Rochelle Spencer to discuss the topics of Afrofuturism and speculative Black writing and poetics, but I'd forgotten about it until she alerted me that our exchange was set to appear in Chicago Literati, and it did this past spring (April). Here's a link to the piece, which Rochelle titled "'Like Currents in a River': A Conversation with Speculative Writer John Keene." Since this discussion occurred before the many since Counternarratives appeared, it was a bit more free-wheeling in many ways. Many thanks to Rochelle (now Dr. Spencer, I believe!) and Chicago Literati for running it.

Here is one Q&A exchange from that conversation that centers on the Black Arts Movement:

RS: You just alluded to the Black Arts Movement. How did the Black Arts Movement influence the Dark Room?

Keene: The DNA of the Black Arts Movement is in every contemporary Black American poet and in Black poets all over the world, whether they acknowledge this influence or not. The ideas of self discovery, black pride, connection, to do something on your own rather than waiting for someone else to do it—those ideas were central to Dark Room Collective writers in their youth, so I feel we wouldn’t have been possible without them, without the crucial well of Black Arts Movement poets. They are invaluable, and they remain invaluable, though people sometimes talk about the Movement as if it failed. I think counter to that: their influence will continue well into the first century and beyond.

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Lastly, I don't think I'd mentioned on this blog that, by some strange turn of events, Counternarratives finally received a review, two years after its hardcover debut, and a glorious one at that, in The New York Times Book Review this past September. I extend my profound thanks to writer and critic Julian Lucas, who authored the long and insightful review essay, one of the finest and most in depth the book has received. Titled "Epic Stories That Expand the Universal Family Plot," it situates the collection in relation to the history of fictional family sagas in order to show how it performs, as it were, a kind of queer affiliation and relationality, how it embodies a different understanding of history and kinship, that might offer a way forward for the future. (I have decided not to expend any additional energy trying to figure out why the Times completely ignored the book when it appeared in 2015.)

Here is how Lucas ends his review, a fitting tribute to the book and to many who are tending similar literary and artistic gardens:

Entranced by the ancestor who crossed on the Mayflower, escaped from the plantation or started anew in a hostile foreign city, we too often limit our retrospective gaze to those predecessors who made provisions for a future we recognize in our own present. We deprive ourselves of people whose visions were never realized, who left no obvious legacy. More people have lived on earth than the tendentious nets of genealogy — inevitably tangled in the chronologies of faith, race, nation — can catch, and we are connected to them by threads more subtle, and resonances more profound, than have yet been explored. Imagining those lives, deeply and without the prejudice that they must be prologue to our world, can be both radical and beautiful.

Boston Globe Picks Counternarratives + Matthew Cheney on My Sentences

Counternarratives originally appeared roughly two years ago in hardcover, and since then has received a host of reviews, on these shores and across the Atlantic. What has not occurred since July 2015 (and The Wall Street Journal's positive take) was for a major US newspaper to review the book. So it was both surprising and encouraging that the Boston Globe selected Counternarratives, among a host of other books, for its Summer 2017 Reading Picks, and reviewer Anthony Domestico offered one of the better rationales to check out the book, a one-sentence summary that could serve as a perfect little blurb:

"Keene’s story collection is truly radical — in its politics, in its stylistic restlessness, in its rethinking of the myths we tell ourselves about race and sexuality in the history of the Americas."

The Boston Globe blurb

Beach reading? Why not?

***

It is National Short Story Month--did you know that? I didn't!--and author, blogger and critic Matthew Cheney has chosen to write one of the best short critical assessments of Counternarratives' prose for his friend, Dan Wickett, at the Emerging Writers Network. Titled "Keene Sentences," it provides a perspicuous reading of what he sees the Counternarratives' sentences--and the prose, spreading outward to the stories' structures, and the collection as a whole--undertaking and achieving.   He gets it, and gets it right on target. Here's a quote:

Here, again, deferral: “It was […] the very first thing he saw.” Because of it’s structure, this is not a sentence most readers will absorb fully on one reading. It is a sentence that explodes from the inside, its substance packed in between subject, verb, and object, and as such it enacts many of the ideas of this book — for instance, that the detail and complexity of experience is lost by some ways of telling stories and using language and constructing histories. What Keene is up to in this sentence, and in much of the book generally, parallels some of what Chinua Achebe achieved with Things Fall Apart, reflected in the painful, ironic final sentences of the novel (“One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger”).

The reference to Achebe's writing I take as the highest praise, and I thank him for this deep and illuminating reading, which is what authors hope for from critics. If you want to read more of Matthew Cheney's writing, you can purchase his Hudson Prize-winning short story collection, Blood: Stories, published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016. A fine review of the award is available here, and you can hear Matthew talking about Blood: Stories on New Hampshire Public Radio.

You can also read his 14-year-long blog, The Mumpsimus, which brims with smart literary and cultural readings and critiques, sharp as a laser but never wielded like a blade. In his most recent post, he writes about watching the films of the late German wunderkind director Rainer Werner Fassbinder now. (I keep thinking and hoping that Fassbinder's aesthetically innovative, critically engaged art and his guerrilla approach to filmmaking will inspire younger generations of queer, especially queer POC, filmmakers, and perhaps that's happening, perhaps on YouTube or Vimeo or another platform, so if anyone knows whether this is the case, please do post a comment.

In other recent posts, Cheney has explored Guido Mazzoni's A Theory of the Novel, and earlier posts walk readers through Samuel Delany's temporally-reversed Dark Reflections, and a book by an author I often recommend to students interested in speculative writing and good storytelling, Kelly Link's Stone Animals. There's a lot more at Mumpsimus, so definitely check it out, and pick up his collection if you can.
.

Fitzcarraldo Wins Republic of Consciousness Prize for *Counternarratives*!

Republic of Consciousness
Prize Announcement

Yesterday evening in a cozy room in London, as I moved through my usual Thursday workday, meeting with students and giving a mid-term exam in Newark, the ceremony for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses was underway. Last fall I blogged about this new prize, which author and publisher Neil Griffiths established to honor smaller British presses that took the financial risk, which is substantial, of publishing more formally and thematically challenging writing. As the RoCP's initial announcement stated, the prize selection criteria could be boiled down to two elements, "hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose." In November the British edition of Counternarratives, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, was named to its longlist, and subsequently its shortlist of eight finalists in January.

Neil Griffiths, speaking to RoCP's
ceremony audience, Fyvie Hall

At the packed London ceremony in Fyvie Hall on Regents Street, Griffiths, accompanied by the judges, and in the presence of the nominated publishers and their staff, journalists, writers, editors, and other members of the British literary world, announced that Fitzcarraldo was the winner of the first Republic of Consciousness Prize for Counternarratives! In their unanimous decision, the six-judge jury described the collection as a "once in a generation achievement for short-form fiction," and lauded its "subject matter, formal inventiveness, multitude of voices, and seriousness of purpose." Fitzcarraldo publisher Jacques Testard and Fitzcarraldo PR guru Nicolette Praça were there to accept the prize, and Testard offered remarks about the award's importance for Fitzcarraldo and for small presses in the UK and everywhere.

Fitzcarraldo received the top £3000 prize, and the shortlist finalists, which were Tramp Press, which published Briton Mike McCormack’s novel Solar Bones (winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and & Other Stories, which published Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield’s novel Martin John, each received £1000. In addition, publisher Galley Beggar received the Best First Novel or Collection Prize and £1000 for UK author Paul Stanbridge’s Forbidden Line, which Griffiths praised for its "multitudinous energy." The Guardian wrote up the ceremony; you can find the article here. Publishing site The Bookseller also wrote about the prize here. You can also hear Testard and Griffiths spoke about the award and small presses in a radio interview on the Robert Elms show on BBC Radio London (beginning at 1:09:20).

'''

I've never had the pleasure of meeting Jacques Testard in person, but he, Nicolette Praça and everyone affiliated with Fitzcarraldo have been a dream to work with, and I am very thankful that he took the leap of publishing my book. (And especially delighted still in the press's choice of Yves Klein International Blue for its fiction covers!) Many thanks also to the prize jury, who unanimously chose Counternarratives, and once again, a million thanks to Neil Griffiths for establishing the award, for his work as an author and publisher, and for his advocacy of small-press publishing.

Contemporary Black Canvas Podcast + Counternarratives News: January 2017

For years I've regularly listened to literature and ideas podcasts but have long felt about far too many posted by mainstream US institutions lack any real diversity, some hosting lineups of invited artists and thinkers so un-diverse that it would be dishonest to describe them as practicing anything but intellectual, literary and cultural apartheid. Fortunately these days are increasingly more options, one of which I learned about last fall: Contemporary Black Canvas. Hosted by founder Dr. Pia Deas, a literature professor and scholar at HBCU Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and available on the iTunes store and via the net (for your laptop), Contemporary Black Canvas aims, as Deas states on the sites landing page, to celebrate

the depth and breadth of the Black artistic and intellectual traditions from across the African Diaspora and Africa. Through conversations with leading writers, musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, dancers, radical gardeners, and institution builders, we examine the Black imagination as a vital, vibrant, and dynamic force for individual and collective transformation.

Generocity's Dante Kirby wrote an informative article about Deas and Contemporary Black Canvas, which I recommend. So far Contemporary Black Canvas has challenged black underrepresentation on the podcast front by hosting a rich array of contemporary cultural producers, including culinary artist Pascale Boucicaut and photographer Adachi Pimentel, curator and festival organizer Maori Karamel Holmes, visual artist Akili Ron Anderson, multiplatform artists Mendi+Keith Obadike, dancer and choreographer Lela Aisha Jones, and Poet Laureate of Philadelphia Yolanda Wisher. Most recently she invited me to participate in a conversation about Counternarratives and my work in general, and it was a wonderful experience (even if I do sound a bit of a spaz!). I really appreciated for the opportunity.

Please do consider adding the podcasts to add to your mix, and enjoy!

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I recently received the very good news that Counternarratives had made the shortlist for the inaugural Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses! I'd previously written about the crowdfunded prize and how my collection made the longlist, which comprised some twenty works, many experimental in form and content, by independent publishers in the UK. The Guardian features a short writeup about the shortlist of 8 books, evenly divided between novels and short story collections, including a nice mention of Counternarratives. However it goes, many thanks to the judges and especially Neil Griffiths for establishing this way to honor small presses.

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Another positive mention for Counternarratives appeared in LitHub's list of the "Most Important Books of the Last 20 Years." One of the judges deemed the collection worthy of inclusion, so many thanks to whoever among that illustrious list selected my book. After reading through the list, which is long on imaginative literature (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, a few academic and journalistic books), a good thing, I think, but a bit short on scholarly books, so I posed the question on Twitter, which scholarly books published in the last 20 years would you list as the most important or influential? Please leave your suggestions in the comments section.

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Two recent reviews, one extended, the second brief, of the French edition of Counternarratives have been published. The longer one, by Juan Asensio, appeared on STALKER of Counternarratives / ContrenarrationsContrenarrations. Probing and laudatory, it also manages to broach some aspects of the book that haven't been touched upon at all in most of the books reviews, in the US or British press, including the book's exploration of marranos and conversos during the Inquisition era, and invokes figures ranging from Siegfried Kracauer to Leo Strauss (!) in discussing some of the ideas it contains. It's a wonderful piece, and I really appreciate that Juan Asensio engaged with the book so deeply.

French novelist Florence Noiville wrote a mini-review for major French daily Le Monde's book section, as part of their year-end 28 "Books in brief" section. She describes me as a "new voice in African American literature," which isn't really the case, but ends with "And to follow closely," which was nice. I hope French readers will do so, and buy the book.

Lastly, in Mediapart, Lisa Wajeman makes the case in her article "L'histoire noire américaine est devenue un sujet littéraire," which, based on French historian's Sylvain Pattieu's Nous avons arpenté un chemin caillouteux (We Have Walked Along a Stony Path), which explores Black Panthers Jean and Melvin McNair's 1972 hijacking of a plane to Algeria; Nate Parker's film Birth of a Nation, and translations of Ta-Nehisi Coates's meditative critical essay Between the World and Me and Counternarratives, African American literature has over the past year become a literary subject...in France. One fine touch is Wajeman's use of the concept of "counternarratives " to frame not only my book, but all the works under discussion.

"Employment of whites and black people in Georgia, and
"Enslaved and free black people between 1790-1870,"
color plates from W. E. B. DuBois, The Georgia Negro:
A Study, 1900. All rights reserved.

Counternarratives on Belgian Radio, in a French Journal, and on a British Prize Longlist

A few weeks ago, sound engineer and radio host Alain Cabaux spoke with Emmanuel Requette, from Brussel's Librairie Ptyx (Ptyx Bookstore), hosted a lively, enthusiastic conversation about the French edition of Counternarratives on Radio Campus, based at the Université Libre du Bruxelles.

It would take a while to translate the entire thing and they unfortunately do not provide a written transcript, but it was clear that both Cabaux and Requette enjoyed the book and were sparked to think quite a bit about it, even broaching a few topics that haven't received much discussion in US reviews, on topics such as religion.

If you speak French, you can hear the entire conversation here, as well as music by Matana Roberts and the great Bluesman Robert Johnson. Many thanks to both of them and to my brilliant translator, Bernard Hoepffner and publisher, Éditions Cambourakis, because of whom the book is on Librairie Ptyx's bookshelves. Enjoy! (H/t to James Oscar for telling me about meeting Mr. Cabaux, and his kind comments on the book, too.)


***

Also, in the French journal En Attendant Nadeau, Claude Grimal pens a throrough, praiseworthy review of Contrenarrations, titling it "Sujétion, Liberté et Imagination" (Subjection, Liberty, and Imagination), with the summary that "Le romancier américain John Keene fait preuve dans son Contrenarrations de beaucoup d’ambition, d’érudition et de talent. La force épique de son livre et l’extrême attention qu’il porte à l’écriture sont la preuve d’une foi énergique en la littérature." (Translation: "The American novelist John Keene show evidence of great ambition, erudition and talent in his book Counternarratives. The epic force of his book and his extreme attention to writing are evidence of an energetic faith in literature.")

The review continues in that very positive.  He concludes the review by saying:

L’auteur, qui dote ses personnages d’une remarquable imagination afin de montrer qu’elle est en elle même émancipatrice, est pourvu comme eux de ce don. Il faudrait adapter pour lui les pensées qu’il attribue à Melle LaLa, flottant au dessus du sol, reliée par la bouche à son fil : « je voudrais suspendre la ville entière de Paris ou même la France elle-même à mes lèvres… je cherche à dépasser les limites imposées à moins que je ne les aies placées là, car c’est à cela que je pense quand je pense à la liberté ». Penser à la liberté est un chemin pour les écrivains, autant que pour les assujettis comme le montre, avec un brio acrobatique, les histoires de Contrenarrations.

(The author, who endows his characters with a remarkable imagination in order to show that it is in itself emancipatory, is provided like them with this gift. It would be necessary to adapt for him the thoughts he attributes to Miss LaLa, floating above the ground, connected by her mouth to her wire: "I want to suspend the entire city of Paris or even France itself from my lips...I aim to exceed every limit placed on me unless I place it there, because that is what I think of when I think of freedom." Thinking about freedom is a way for writers, as much as their subjects, as Counternarratives' stories show, with an acrobatic brio.)

Many thanks to Mr. Grimal for this reading, to En Attendant Nadeau for publishing it, and of course, to Bernard Hoepffner and Éditions Cambourakis.

***

Finally, on the other side of the English Channel, or La Manche, depending upon your perspective, a new prize, The Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses, has named Counternarratives to its Longlist! What's the rationale behind this prize? Here's what writer and publisher Neil Griffiths, its founder, has to say.

The winner will be chosen based on two criteria, perfectly expressed on the Galley Beggar website as ‘hardcore literary fiction and gorgeous prose’. 

Eligible publishers will have a maximum of five fulltime paid people working for them. The prize is open to UK and Irish publishers. 

One novel or single author collection of short stories per publisher can be summited in the calendar year. With one wild card entry per judge.

The Times Literary Supplement wrote about this prize, quoting Griffiths:

"Whatever one thinks about awards in the arts, they do tend to attract attention, boost sales, and provide a little momentum – which is always a good thing. And even though the money won’t be Booker or Costa levels, any money is always welcome. And if the prize can include the independent bookshops – as judges and points of sale – then everyone wins".

It also noted that the 9 judges are "Griffiths, his co-chair Marcus Wright, and the booksellers Sam Fisher (Burley Fisher Books, London) Gary Perry (Foyles, London) Anna Dreda (Wenlock Books, Shropshire) Helen Stanton (Forum Books, Northumberland) Lyndsy Kirkman (Chapter One Books, Manchester), Emma Corfield (Book-ish, Crickhowell, Wales) and Gillian Robertson (Looking Glass Books, Fife, Scotland)." The Guardian also wrote it up.

Originally, the Longlist wasn't to be announced until November 30, but it appears to have been moved up. The Shortlist won't be determined until next January, and the prize won't be awarded until March 2017. At the Review 31 site, Mr. Griffiths elaborates on the prize, and writes blurbs about each of the book. Here's the marvelous summary he wrote about Counternarratives, which is the kind of comment you can't pay for!

Fitzcarraldo Editions for Counternarratives by John Keene

Counternarratives is a work of great distinction, a once in a generation addition to short form fiction. It moves the form on; it deepens it. Few works of fiction operate on this kind of intellectual and textural level and still remain rooted in the human experience. Spanning four centuries, many countries, using different narrative forms as inspiration, each story unfolds with a control and wisdom that is startling. When compared to this, most other prose seems oddly ingratiating, as if Keene has decided that to ask for our indulgence is to undermine some fundamental truth being enacted in the stories. Few novels are works of art and few works of art are moral acts – this is one of them. And what’s more it’s a pleasure to read. That this set of stories and novellas has not made every shortlist its eligible for is a travesty.

Here's Mr. Griffith's announcement of the prize:


Whatever happens, it's wonderful for the book and its British publisher to receive some recognition, and many thanks to Mr. Griffiths, his committee, and Fitzcarraldo Editions!

Photos: Venice Beach

While out in Los Angeles last week to read at the Otis College of Art I had the pleasure of visiting Venice Beach, which I hadn't seen since I was a child. Many thanks to everyone at Otis, especially Peter Gadol, who made my visit possible, and here are a few photos from my stroll along the Venice Beach Speedway and up Rose Avenue nearby.

Looking north along the Speedway,
towards Santa Monica

Looking south 

One of many talented
live musicians

Another view

Pigeons and other birds
feasting on bagels 

People biking along the beach

Looking east 

I didn't dare hop on a skateboard
though it might have been the quickest
way to see everything

T-shirts 

A bit of turf near the surf

#kamakosmickrusader

The mural says it all  

A vintage Jeep 

Rose Ave

Self-portrait in a plate
glass mirror

Full Circle

One of many homeless
encampments 

A semi-arbor (or
overgrown bush) 

A rhododendron 

Looking west to the beach

Street scene 

At Otis College of Art,
during a fire drill

In the quadrangle

Some of the Otis students

Contrenarrations: the French Edition of Counternarrations On Bookshelves

On August 24, the French edition of Counternarratives, published by Éditions Cambourakis, retitled Contrenarrations and superbly translated by Bernard Hoepffner, hit bookstores. (As I may have written before, Hoepffner was one of the most perspicuous editors I have ever worked with, and perfectly complemented my excellent New Directions editor Barbara Epler.) Cambourakis chose a painting by the great Bill Traylor to grace the cover, maintaining the theme and style of the New Directions cover, but endowing it with its own distinctive look:

There have been several short prose reviews so far; the first, by Emmanuel Requette, on the website of Librairie Ptyx, was one that the translator, Hoepffner, forwarded directly to me. It's very good. A brief quote:

Ce n’est pas Le Noir, La Négritude, L’opprimé qui est le cœur de Contrenarrations, mais sa parole. Brimée, bridée, brisée, mais jamais éteinte, conservant dans la possibilité de son advenue toute sa force. Mieux encore, enfouies sous des couches de silence forcé, semblent y avoir mûri des manières plus subtiles et fécondes de rendre compte. Jamais inutilement post-moderne, ni victimaire, ni doloriste, Contrenarrations consacre génialement le rôle impertinent et salvateur de la forme.

[Rough translation: It isn't the Black Person [or Blackness], Blackness, the Oppressed that is the heart of Counternarratives, but their speech. Bullied, constrained, broken, but never extinguished, keeping all its force in the possibility of its occurrence. Better still, buried under layers of enforced silence, seeming to have ripened in more subtle and fruitful ways of taking account of things . Never uselessly postmodern, nor playing the victim, nor lugubrious, Counternarratives brilliantly consecrates the impertinent and saving role of form.]

On their Facebook page, Éditions Cambourakis also features this review by Damien Aubel from the French monthly magazine Transfuge's coverage of the August rentrée littéraire:

I also came across the following tweet, by Olivier Lamm, about Contrenarrations' appearance at a recent Rentrée littéraire in Paris (I think): he says that the book was winner by knockout (and evil spirits--referencing several characters in the collection)! It's nice praise and I'll take it!

Worker Writers School Fall Open House on Governor's Island

The packed house at Worker Writers School

This past Saturday, at the invitation of the brilliant poet, professor and activist Mark Nowak, I had the pleasure of attending and participating in this year's "Fall Open House," a series of mini-workshops, conversations, and readings, which the Worker Writers School organized in collaboration with PEN America. The half-day event took place at Nolan Park House #11 on Governors Island (which I'd never before visited), and brought together participants from a range of labor unions and social action organizations, ranging from the Domestic Workers United, the Taxi Workers Alliance, and the Street Vendor Project to Picture the Homeless and the Retail Action Project. Though a swelter descended in the early morning, transforming the Nolan Park house into a kiln, participants (including one of our new Rutgers-Newark MFA students) kept dropping in, and though I had to head back before the final session, Mark noted that many participants stayed even into the early evening.

The sessions included Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin, speaking about socialism and organizing; a panel on Vocabularies of Resistance, featuring scholar, author, activist and Williams College professor Joy James, political scientist and founding member of Lower East Side Community Labor Organization Immanuel Ness, and investigative reporter and author Anjali Kamat; a writing session led by the stellar poet and professor Patricia Smith, entitled "Giving the Stories Room"; Pulitzer Prize-winner Dale Maharidge speaking on "Someplace Like America"; and a concluding reading by the Worker Writers’ School participants. I followed Bhaskar and talked not only about my own Counternarratives, but about the necessity of counternarratives and stories of resistance more broadly in transforming the guiding narratives in this and other societies.

In addition to the speaking and writing sessions, the Fall Open House also included the U.S. film premiere of Vienna-based artist and filmmaker Oliver Ressler's Emergency Turned Upside Down, which ran several times during the day, and, in the darkroom at the rear of the building, photographer Daniel Johnson created a Proletarian Nights Photo Booth, inspired by philosopher and critic Jacques Rancière, with both digital and Polaroid photos free of charge. Many thanks to Mark again, and to all the presenters and participants for an enlightening, invigorating day--and perfect reason finally to venture over to Governor's Island.

Some photos:

The bookselling table

Mark (at left) and some of
the participants

The Proletarian Nights Photo
Booth, pre-set up

Bhaskar Sunkara, at center, before
his presentation

During the first session

Marian, Joy James, and Immanuel Ness 

Immanuel Ness, about to speak 

Immanuel Ness, Anjali Kamat
and Patricia Smith

Patricia Smith fanning herself
(it was hot!) as she got everyone
thinking, dreaming and writing

Counternarratives Wins an American Book Award

I am elated to announce that Counternarratives has received a 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation (BCF).  When I remember this book's long journey to publication, and meditate on the aims of this vitally important literary and cultural organization and all the books and authors it has honored in the past, including my MFA colleague, poet, memoirist, fiction writer, and critic Rigoberto González, I consider this be one of the highest honors possible.

Congratulations also go to all of this year's other recipients, and an especial congrats to two other honorees affiliated with Rutgers-Newark: my colleague Lyra Monteiro, an assistant professor of history, who received the Walter and Lillian Lowenfels Prize for Criticism for her essay on the play Hamilton, and journalist Nick Turse, author of Tomorrow's Battlefield: US Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa (Haymarket Books), who received an MA in history from RU-N in 1999. 

About the three of us, BCF chairman Justin Desmangles said:

“We are proud to honor the work of John Keene, whom we regard as among the most innovative and exciting writers in America today. The richness and fertility of his imagination coupled with the elegance of his prose produce a unique literary experience. In addition, we consider Lyra Montiero's critical perspectives to be both vital and courageous. Her rigorous, inventive, and powerfully deciphering analysis of “Hamilton,” the musical, was a much-needed antidote to the toxic commercial hyperbole. Finally, Nick Turse's efforts to expose secret U.S. military operations in Africa should be regarded as heroic. At BCF, we consider Turse to be in the tradition of the greatest journalists, penetrating the subterfuge and excavating information and perspectives otherwise missing or ignored.

Below is the official announcement from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Again, many thanks to them, and to everyone who helped make this book possible!