“What strikes me as a brilliant book is a book that I totally get lost in when I’m reading it. I absolutely believe in the characters. I feel as they feel. So, when they’re hurting, I’m hurting. When they’re happy, I’m happy. And I just get lost in it. So, for me, when I’m writing,…

Adventure-seasoned and storm-buffeted, I shun all signs of anchorage, because The zest of life exceeds the bound of laws. –  Excerpt from  poem entitled One Year After by Claude McKay These lines from one of his poems could almost be Claude McKay’s life motto. Born in Sunny Ville,  Jamaica to a mother of Madagascan descent and a…

The third edition of our regular series of articles introducing the life and work of a great black writer.

“Although I had been writing for many years as a ‘hobby’, I only turned to serious writing when I was 21. I had tried various avenues for making money and none of them had worked. I really wanted to build a music studio, so I decided to write a book and sell it, and then…

“Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. I am also comfortably asocial—a hermit…. A pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.” – Octavia…