Lavelle Porter

Sep 23, 2024 | poetryfoundation.org | Benjamin Voigt |Lavelle Porter

Audre Lorde is dead. Long live Audre Lorde. When a French or British monarch dies, it is custom for royal subjects to proclaim this seeming paradox: The queen is dead! Long live the queen! Their aim is to acknowledge the demise of a monarch (an individual) while affirming the persistence of the monarchy (the institution).

Dec 27, 2023 | daily.jstor.org | Lavelle Porter |Margaret Russett |Derek C. Maus |LEAH MILNE

The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. Cards on the table. I’ve probably read Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure more than most people. I’ve taught it, and I’ve written about it as academic satire in my 2019 book The Blackademic Life: Academic Fiction, Higher Education, and the Black Intellectual. In fact, Erasure was one of the books that inspired The Blackademic Life.

Feb 22, 2023 | daily.jstor.org | Lavelle Porter |Charles Nilon |Charles H. Rowell |Samuel R. Delany

On April Fools’ Day, Samuel R. Delany will turn 81. These days he’s the lovable, bearded grandpa of American science fiction, but back in the 1960s Delany was a controversial young phenomenon in the field. He was born in Harlem in 1942, into a prominent black family that includes, among others, his aunts Sadie and Bessie Delany, famously known as the Delany Sisters, who were the subject of the best-selling book Having Our Say.