Sasha Ann Panaram

“To Free Someone Else”: Toni Morrison the Book Editor A recent book on her career in publishing makes the case that the great American novelist should also be seen as a pathbreaking editor.

"[Toni] Morrison’s skill as an editor surely made her a better writer, but it undeniably took time and energy away from her own work, and it was never fully appreciated as an intellectual endeavor in itself." -- Marina Magloire via @thenation.com

GLEN COULTHARD (Yellowknives Dene/Canada), Scholar of Indigenous Studies)

CANISIA LUBRIN (St. Lucia/Canada) Poet

MADELEINE THIEN (Canada) Novelist

IMMANUEL WILKINS (US) Saxophonist, Composer, Arranger

The Alchemy Lecture 2025

Sound—at the Interregnum

Glen Coulthard
Canisia Lubrin
Madeleine Thien
Immanuel Wilkins

Date: October 30, 2025
Time: 5 - 8 p.m. (Reception: 5 - 6 p.m.)
Venue: Tribute Communities Recital Hall, CIBC Lobby (Location) YorkU
Event type: Hybrid – in person and online

I recently participated in the Toni Morrison Symposium @cornelluniversity.bsky.social as part of the “Toni Morrison and the Word Work of Her Nonfiction” panel. Sharing a few photos from the event including a mural of Toni Morrison painted by students from Ithaca High School.

The Book I Love to Teach: Fordham Professors Share Their Syllabus Standouts From a history of the deadly poisons to a Pulitzer Prize-winner by Toni Morrison, Fordham faculty shared the books they love to teach.

Had a chance to talk about why I like teaching A Map to the Door of No Return by Dionne Brand. There has yet to be a class @fordham.edu where I haven't had this book on the syllabus. Great to see what my colleagues are teaching, too!

The Art and Genius of Lorna Simpson A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art tracks what has changed and what has remained the same in the artist’s work.

"A former documentary photographer, [Lorna] Simpson harnessed the medium in her early practice to develop a body of work that explores how meaning is assigned to the body and its images." -- Rachel Hunter Himes via @thenation.com

“I am so busy. So caught up with living.”

At the Full and Change of the Moon, Dionne Brand

The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture On a cold night in February 1977, a group of eight Black women posed for a photograph in Brooklyn. These women who called themselves The Sisterhood gathered under a framed portrait of Bessie Smith. So...

Thank you @sashapanaram.bsky.social for your review of *The Sisterhood.* I feel lucky to be in scholarly conversation with your work.

scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/rals/ar...

@columbiaup.bsky.social

It was such a joy to read and review your latest book! I learned so much from you.

Exploring Octavia Butler’s Beginnings as a Sci-Fi Trailblazer It was Octavia Margaret who gave her daughter the spark to even consider a writing career. She saw her quiet, bookish ten-year-old daughter writing, saw the delight on her face as she created, and …

"She [Octavia E. Butler] wanted freedom and independence—not the responsibility of babies or a husband. She made writing her rebellion, the main refuge from the strictness of her upbringing." -- Susana M. Morris via Literary Hub

Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire? To some, the fires lit in New York in the late seventies signalled rampant criminality; to others, rebellion. But maybe they were signs of something else entirely.

"The vague impression that Bronxites burned down their own borough endures, while the vast fortunes made were forgotten." -- @benchansfield.bsky.social via @newyorker.com

After 50 Years of Writing, Jamaica Kincaid Insists She’s Still an Amateur

"You see me in the garden walking around just plundering around thinking of a sentence. Sometimes it takes me a week to finish a sentence just to get it right." -- Jamaica Kincaid via @nytimes.com

Suddenly, Jamaica | Henry Louis Gates Jr. Jamaica Kincaid’s commanding, irreverent work immerses her readers in a black world without explaining or defining its blackness. This seems to be a major departure in the history of African American ...

"One might say that her [Jamaica Kincaid] work is self-consciously modest, that her fiction never grandstands. It gets to the marrow of how motherhood, childhood, and femininity are dented by colonialism, certainly, but it does so by illuminating the struggle simply to become a human being."

Amy Sherald Cancels Her Smithsonian Show, Citing Censorship

"Amy Sherald has withdrawn her upcoming solo show from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because she said she had been told the museum was considering removing her painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty to avoid provoking President Trump."

The Measure of the World By attending to the vibrant specificity of Black life, poet Dionne Brand contests the cruel mathematics of empire.

"To sustain poetry in the absence of its radical muse—left collective political action—to sustain poetry when there is no inspiration, that was my work." -- Dionne Brand via @jewishcurrents.bsky.social

Had to grab the Canadian version of Dionne Brand’s Salvage while in town. Love the cover!

Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Whitney Museum

Caught a few incredible documentaries at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier in June. First time attending and already can’t wait for next year.

You Know the Novelist. Now Meet Toni Morrison the Editor.

"With great respect and meticulous research, @danaawilliamsink.bsky.social reveals [Toni] Morrison as a hard worker, a devoted literary citizen and one of the most important book editors of the 20th century." -- Martha Southgate via @nytimes.com

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“If you center Black women in your political work and cultural work, then you’re cooking with gas.” — dream hampton @fordfoundation.org

I couldn't stand the tantrums she was throwing! Had to put the television on mute!

This piece, “Ghost Note,” from the Lorna Simpson: Source Notes exhibit at @metmuseum.org continues to haunt me.

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes @metmuseum.org

Reviewed Oneka LaBennett's latest book Global Guyana for @sxsalon.bsky.social. As I write in the review, "LaBennett reminds readers that we cannot tell the history of Guyana without careful attention to its women and girls." Check it out and go get the book!

smallaxe.net/sxsalon/revi...

Announcing the launch of sx salon 48. The issue includes essays by Amandla Thomas-Johnson and Stéphane Martelly, reviews by Sasha Ann Panaram, Oriana Méjías Martinez, Maddi Chan and Linzey Corridon, poems by Letitia Marie Pratt, and stories by José Darío Martínez Milantchi and Alicia Valasse-Polius.

How Lorna Simpson Broke the Frame Simpson’s wryly evasive photos, films, collages—and now paintings—peel back the layers of our looking.

"[Lorna] Simpson is contemporary art's astronomer of the archives, always searching for the dark matter that 'documentary' images conceal." -- @jcljules.bsky.social via @newyorker.com

“Why not imagine a new radical set of arrangements? Why not imagine more than what seems reasonable?” — Saidiya Hartman @fordham.edu

Jennifer Lopez’s Alma Mater to Stay Open as Nuns Sell to a Casino Firm Bally’s Corporation will buy Preston High School’s buildings and lease them back to the Catholic school, a victory for foes of a plan to close the Bronx institution.

"We are overjoyed that Preston will remain open for young women in the Bronx. It’s beyond a school. It’s about the future of the Bronx, New York and even the country, because these are our future leaders." -- Jackeline Stewart-Hawkins via @nytimes.com