Description
OBSIDIAN’S RADIANCE features four folios celebrating writing and arts of the African diaspora. Fiction folio “Radiant Youth: Stories of Light & Darkness,” edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, explores and reveals what it means to be a child and how the experiences of our youth can impact and linger, even into our adulthood, sometimes for the rest of our days, complicating what it means to be a Black child living in a world that every day seems to want to remove you from it. The special section guest edited by Nancy D. Tolson with Wesley Jacques, “Visions & Words for Youth,” invites questions, doubts, and challenges to the status quo with regard to how we read Black children. The annual Furious Flower Poetry Prize folio, judged by Kei Miller and introduced by Lauren K. Alleyne, celebrates the winner, honorable mention, and finalists, whose words, Gwendolyn Brooks might say, move with “wicked grace.” Also included is an Editors’ Folio, with new poetry and visual art.
Poetry. African & African American Studies. Art. Diaspora. Anthology.
Author Bio
Poet, sound artist, and scholar Duriel E. Harris is the author of three critically acclaimed volumes of poetry, including DRAG (Elixir Press, 2003) and NO DICTIONARY OF LIVING TONGUE (Nightboat Books, 2017), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Award finalist. Harris is Professor of English at Illinois State University and Editor of Obsidian.
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning editor and the author of three collections, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future (Third Man Books, 2020), Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press, 2016), and Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press, 2011). She is the editor of the groundbreaking anthologies Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004). Sheree is the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Widely anthologized, her work also appears in The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (1945-2010), Marvel's Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, and the New York Times.
Nancy D. Tolson is the assistant director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. Tolson has been a Ford Fellow, an NEH facilitator, a Fulbright scholar/lecturer at the University of Cape Coast (Ghana), and an Illinois Humanities' "Road Scholar." Nancy is the author of Black Children's Literature Got de Blues: The Creativity of Black Writers and Illustrators (2008) and Tales of Africa (1998). She is a commissioner for the Columbia Museum of Art.
Wesley Jacques is a writer, educator, and researcher of children's literature and culture. His scholarly focus is on power and inequity, especially as it pertains to Black children globally. He received his doctorate from Illinois State University and is currently a lecturer at Clayton State University in Georgia.
Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collectio
Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA