Gabrielle Bellot

Kamau Brathwaite and the Voice of the Caribbean

For Kamau Brathwaite, inextricably interwoven into their fabrics of Caribbean culture were the African religious images, cadences, and terpsichorean rhythms that had traveled from the shores of West Africa to the West Indies.

James Baldwin’s Harlem Through a Child’s Eyes

In 1976, James Baldwin released what is perhaps his most novel—and most often forgotten—book: Little Man, Little Man, a curious, hybrid-genre composition without precedent in his body of work. It was rediscovered in 1996 at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and republished last year.

I Will Not Be an Invisible Trans Woman

The significant hostility directed at transgender people means that we can be used as a convenient political tool: if the right wishes to divert attention from any failure or scandal of its own making, all it needs is a quick resort to anti-transgender propaganda.

Alone with Elizabeth Bishop

“When you write my epitaph,” Elizabeth Bishop famously told the poet Robert Lowell in 1974, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.” But being lonely and being alone are not the same, and Bishop recognized from a young age that there was something special, even salvific, about the latter.