Tag: Americana
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The Sealey Challenge: The Hill We Climb
The world knows Amanda Gorman’s name. Much of the world, I think, has probably heard her speak, her voice soaring over our capitol’s steps, promising a bright, hopeful new day. I watched her live, and cried my eyes out. Last year I read Maya Angelou’s 1993 inaugural poem, On the Pulse of Morning, and cried […]
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so about the Founding Fathers
So it’s Martin Luther King Day 2021, and our despot in chief—I refuse to call a guy who incites insurrection a president, sorry—and our fascist crew released a paean to white supremacy otherwise known as the 1776 Commission report. It is my fervent hope that this document will go to the depths of hell where […]
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yes, Virginia, history does change
I don’t know what the hell to write, what to say, and so, for this moment, I’m going to write a little about collection development, and reading history, and the importance of understanding—or trying to understand—what came before. We mythologize the hell out of the past, you see. We lie to ourselves, about our families’ […]
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hey so Gatsby isn’t exactly celebratory
January 1 is Public Domain Day, and this year we got rather a windfall of books published in 1925, including F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Now, I really love The Great Gatsby. (Actually, I’ve loved nearly everything Fitzgerald wrote—he was an alcoholic asshole, but he sure could write.) I love The Great Gatsby, and […]
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americana, again: some books I’ve loved
Americana isn’t the right word, probably, but I don’t know what else to call this, a booklist of a very few books that have brought me joy and reminded me of the beautiful, impossible, sometimes terrible wonder of the U.S. I’m not going to lie: I’m terrified. I think a few of my students thought […]
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The Sealey Challenge: On the Pulse of Morning
Who’d have thought, after reading Library of Small Catastrophes and The Verging Cities and Underworlds, it’d be an inaugural poem full of hope that would make me cry? But I’m not a hopeful sort, so maybe that’s why Maya Angelou’s On the Pulse of Morning hits me quite so hard. Angelou’s poem was originally performed […]
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Americana on the picture book page for this 2020 Fourth of July
I thought, this Independence Day, that I’d do something a little different: a booklist that celebrates some of the vast diversity that makes up this American tapestry. After all, if your plan is to celebrate like it’s 1776, and rise up against tyranny, and write a new declaration of antiracism and anti-fascism (because that really […]
Essentially a Nerd 