Facing It

Widely known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s writing has also explored themes of home, black resilience, and jazz and blues music. Komunyakaa was recently the guest of honor at a week-long seminar at James Madison University’s Furious Flower Poetry Center, called “Facing It,” titled after his most famous poem.

The new book Sargent’s Women tells the fascinating stories behind four of John Sargent’s portraits. From English manor houses to New Hampshire artist colonies, Donna M. Lucey ushers us into the scandalous and heartbreaking lives of the Gilded Age high society.

Rock and Roll started out as an interracial forum, but Slate’s pop critic Jack Hamilton says rock turned into a predominantly white music genre, and he’s piecing together why.

The history of the great American game of baseball represents all the paradoxes of race relations in our country. Johnny Moore studies the surprising shift from the 1920’s, when baseball held an important place within the black community, to today, where that place lies in the NBA.