Writing While Black.

• Position: Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing - Book review

Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing

Stephanie Stokes Oliver, editor, with a foreword by Nikki Giovanni

Atria / 37 INK (imprint of Simon & Schuster).

272 pages.

Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing, published early this year, is a collection of black writers writing about writing. It includes twenty-five writers whose work spans twenty-five decades, from Frederick Douglass in 1845 to Barack Obama in 2017. In between are the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Alice Walker. (The section from Obama is taken from an interview with the President that appeared in The New York Times just days before his successor was inaugurated. Like much else, it makes the reader long for a President who spoke in complete sentences and actually read books.)

While Black Ink does not include anything by Lorraine Hansberry, it does showcase some of her contemporaries, including Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), whose 1930s manuscript Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" was just posthumously released in May with a new foreword by Walker. It also includes the slightly younger Walter Dean Myers (1937-2014), best known for his children's and young adult books, including biographies of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali.

Editor Stephanie Stokes Oliver explains...