Walker refuses to lull his readers instead his missives urge them to do better as they consider, through his eyes, how to be a good citizen, how to be a good father, how to live, and how to love. The result is a bracing and often humorous examination by one of America’s most acclaimed essayists of what it is to grow, parent, write, and exist as a black American male. From Mad Creek Press: FINALIST, 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION These powerful essays offer an incisive glimpse into life as a Black man in. “The essays in this collection are restless, brilliant and short.…The brevity suits not just Walker’s style but his worldview, too.…Keeping things quick gives him the freedom to move he can alight on a truth without pinning it into place.” -Jennifer Szalai, the New York Timesįor the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. Whether confronting the medical profession’s racial biases, considering the complicated legacy of Michael Jackson, paying homage to his writing mentor James Alan McPherson, or attempting to break free of personal and societal stereotypes, Walker elegantly blends personal revelation and cultural critique. Winship Award for Nonfiction and named a Best Memoir of the Year by Kirkus Reviews) and The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult. Jerald Walkers recent How to Make a Slave and Other Essays was a finalist for the 2020. Jerald Walker, author of How to Make a Slave and Other Essays Photo: Brenda Molife Walker presents himself in that essay, Balling, as gleefully exploiting the expectations and. Finalist, National Book Award in NonfictionĪ Book of the Year pick from Kirkus, BuzzFeed, and Literary Hub Walker is the author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption (recipient of the 2011 PEN New England/L.L. In conversation with author, essayist, and radio host Solomon Jones.

How to make a slave jerald walker