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Dear Black Woman, First, let me commend you on succeeding against all odds. Somehow you managed; you managed to make it through junior high and high school with your confidence intact. Despite my incessant barrage of negative imagery, you somehow made it this far in your life with a positive sense of self. I applaud […]

I would like to believe that there is a moment in everyone’s life that becomes a point of definition. This if nothing else has been the reality of my experience. My moment of definition was March 2006 when I was a participant in the finals of the Cleveland city wide poetry slam. Two weeks prior […]

During my transition in to high school, two years ago, I was lucky enough to have parents willing and able to sacrifice for my education. I had a choice between attending a smaller urban school that happens to be private and going to the large public high school in the suburb I’ve grown up in. At the […]

There are certain things in life I just can’t explain: Jermaine Jackson’s haircut, Mike Tyson’s face tattoo, and John Mayer’s racist phallus. While I admit to not understanding every enigma, I can usually sense a farce. I wasn’t alive when Milli Vanilli’s track skipped, but let’s be honest, who didn’t see that coming? Although I […]

Dear John Mayer, Dude, wtf?  I was in New Mexico off grid for a few days; I get back home to the Chi, and every straight black girl with a blog now hates you.  I had a message in my Facebook inbox with a link to your Playboy interview, so I figured it out.  Note […]

Hey folks, Insomnia combined with this sinus thing I’ve been battling for a couple of weeks has me behind this morning.  I hope to have a new post up this afternoon, k? Love, me

Since embarking on a solo career in 2003, Beyonce has completely mastered an intoxicating mixture of R&B and Hip Hop that redefined Pop music in the 2000s, her live performances continue to stun audiences around the world, and her fierce protection of her private life from media scrutiny has allowed her to cultivate a largely blemish-less superstar status. All things considered, Beyonce is clearly the greatest and most influential female pop artist of the 2000s.

A short while ago I wrote about Tiger Woods’ fall from mixed-race grace. The same tumble Obama is currently taking. They are both–Barack and Tiger, two wildly popular individuals in powerful positions, in white male dominated fields–politics and golf. If only I could say the similarities ended there. In my first column about Tiger Woods […]

Jimmy Santiago Baca, a leading contemporary Latino poet writing in the United States, reminds us that “Poetry’s mission is to subvert, to question, to challenge, provoke, to flail one’s vulnerability and voice into the marvelous whirlwind of poetry’s awe, flagging at the horns of the raging beast that is societies gluttonous comfort…affirm poetry at any […]

It is the dead of winter in Chicago and my thoughts are drifting back to summer and the month I spent in Costa Rica. My sunny daydreams, however, have been interrupted by some no-so-sunny memories of my trip… Having just arrived and begun working on a school building project in a tiny village in Costa […]

Below is a short story inspired by a conversation I had with my father He stood at the platform ready to deliver his address. Weeks of intense rehearsal had prepared him for this very moment. As he stood attentively in his grey seersucker suit with his crisp white shirt, and wing tip shoes, he looked […]

Dang.  So I had this long post-Super Bowl entry ready about sports and how I don’t enjoy trophy presentations after the game and the plantation model in professional sports and everything, but I just can’t post something like that right now.  Not this morning.  Not when there are people still partying in the French Quarter.