“ powerful essays offer an incisive glimpse into life as a Black man in America….Crafted with honesty and wry comedic flair, these essays are both engaging and enraging.” -Kirkus (starred review) “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 Times Michener and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Walker is Professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College. He has published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, River Teeth, Mother Jones, Iowa Review, and Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including five times in The Best American Essays. Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult and Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, winner of the 2011 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction. 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. 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. Metrowest Regional Emergency Planning Committeeįor 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. Metrowest Commission on the Status of Women Comprehensive Plan Project Management GroupĮnglish Learner Parent Advisory Council (ELPAC)

Jerald walker how to make a slave