Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend is at once a vivid biography of a central figure in American music history and a personal story about one woman’s search for recognition. In this remarkable book, Jackie Kay combines history and personal narrative, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life,

By Joel Brigham   I have taught American Literature for 16 years, and for most of my career, that has meant doing what has always been done. I’ve taught Ralph Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, just like any other self-respecting American Lit teacher in this country, but it

Rep. John Lewis, nonviolent political activist, key leader of the Civil Rights Movement, long-serving member of the House of Representatives, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor, and author of the best-selling March trilogy, died July 17th, 2020. In 2013, Lewis, along with Andrew Aydin, a longtime member of his congressional staff, and comics artist

In 1942, 22 year-old Franci Rabinek arrived at Terezin, a concentration camp and ghetto 40 miles north of her home in Prague. It would be the beginning of her three-year journey through four different camps. Her memoir, Franci’s War, offers her intense, candid account of those dark years before her liberation in 1945. Before that,

Charles Lindbergh: Comparing the Past to the Present It began with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.  That was the story I originally intended to tell.  But as I began corralling my research, the dominant personality that was Charles Lindbergh soon overshadowed everything and everyone else.  He was so complicated, so contradictory, so compelling.  To me, he