The Fire This Time

Two-time National Book Award-winner and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient Jesmyn Ward conceived of The Fire This Time and edited the anthology. She is an associate professor of English at Tulane University. Her Introduction to the book describes its beginnings in her sorrow over the death of Trayvon Martin. Her personal connection to the work of James Baldwin informs her commitment to offer compassionate literature to others, as he did for her. Her essay “Cracking the Code” sees her coming to terms with her mixed genetic heritage and choosing to see it as a symbol of cultural unity. 

Kima Jones wrote the anthology’s hybrid poem, “Homegoing, AD.” A poet and fiction writer and recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, PEN Center USA Emerging Voices, Kimbilo Fiction, and Yaddo’s Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, she blends genres to depict a family in the Southern swamp in this piece.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah contributed “The Weight” to the anthology. Her essay describes her formation as a writer and her personal connection with James Baldwin. Through visiting Baldwin’s former home and lamenting its upcoming demolition, she realized how words like Baldwin’s endure longer than any building.

Associate Professor of Writing and Design at The New School, Wendy S. Walters explores a New England slave burial ground in “Lonely in America.” This personal essay weaves the writer and professor’s personal loneliness with African American history and the devaluation of black life. “Lonely in America” appears in her book Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson wrote the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?” This brief piece demonstrates the writer’s gift for analyzing historical trends and issues a call to action based on her analysis. Wilkerson wrote about The Great Migration in The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

A full professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, rigorous researcher, poet, and member of the prestigious American Antiquarian Society Honorée Fanonne Jeffers documents her search for the truth of poet Phillis Wheatley in her essay “‘The Dear Pledges of Our Love’: A Defense of Phillis Wheatley’s Husband.” Jeffers developed a special connection to Wheatley at an early age and, later, found a major flaw in the scholarship about her. Jeffers has published four collections of poetry.

Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies at Emory University, Carol Anderson’s “White Rage” is a piece from The Washington Post and shares its name with her book White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. This book was a New York Times bestseller and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her piece in the anthology demonstrates a historian’s perspective of systemic racism in the United States. 

Poet and academic Clint Smith contributed the poem “Queries of Unrest” to The Fire This Time. The poem actively searches his identity as a black poet and the role of poetry for the self and the reader. Smith has published Counting Descent, a poetry collection that features “Queries of Unrest.” 

Kevin Young’s lyrical essay “Blacker Than Thou” demonstrates the poet’s facility with associative, imagistic language. His consideration of Rachel Dolezal and the meaning of black identity draws on his writing the book Bunk, a nonfiction text about hoaxes. Young has also published the poetry collection Jelly Roll and the nonfiction work The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, among several other books. 

Kiese Laymon is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. His Southern heritage informs his praise of his grandmother and the band OutKast in “Da Art of Storytellin’ (a Prequel).” He finds solidarity in his identity as a black Southern man in the music of André and Big Boi, as well as inspiration for his calling as a fiction writer. His first novel was Long Division; his nonfiction works are How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Heavy: An American Memoir. 

Beginning in his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, Garnette Cadogan’s lifelong love of nighttime walking persists in his present life as a researcher and writer in New York City. His essay “Black and Blue” portrays his development as a writer through his devotion to extensive walking, which was treated as a threatening practice once he reached the United States. A celebrated lecturer and journalist, Cadogan is also the editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas. 

The poet Claudia Rankine draws on personal relationships, history, and current events in her essay “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” which affirms the call of the Black Lives Matter movement in remembering lives lost to racially motivated violence. Rankine’s fifth poetry collection, Citizen: An American Lyric, was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. 

While living in New York City, award-winning author Emily Raboteau toured a series of murals there and wrote “Know Your Rights!” about the experience. She considers how to protect her children from police harassment, a constant threat for members of the African and Latin diasporas in New York, and finds hope in the murals’ empowering, protective messages. Raboteau has published numerous works and won the Pushcart Prize and the Nelson Algren award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. 

Novelist Mitchell S. Jackson explores his role as a son of many fathers in the essay “Composite Pops.” His series of character sketches portray each father, both surrogate and biological, and what they taught Jackson about parenting his own children. He has published the Whiting Award-winning novel The Residue Years and the nonfiction work Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family. 

In “Theories of Space and Time,” two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey describes the Mississippi coast, where she was born. The poem comes from her 2016 collection Native Guard, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. A professor and recipient of numerous literary honors, Trethewey has also published four other collections of poetry and a nonfiction work called Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. 

Daniel José Older, best known for fictional works of fantasy, contributes an essay in the style of a letter to The Fire This Time. “This Far: Notes on Love and Revolution” depicts the writer’s early fascination with the words of Eqbal Ahmad and James Baldwin, as well as his devotion to his family in the midst of tragedies like the death of Sandra Bland. His young adult fantasy series include the New York Times-bestselling Dactyl Hill Squad and Shadowshaper.

Edwidge Danticat describes her migration from Haiti to New York City in “Message to My Daughters.” She wants to protect her daughters from racially motivated violence like what she observed as a child in Brooklyn, but she finds a way to explain this truth in light of hope. A prolific fiction writer and essayist, Danticat is a National Book Award finalist and recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

The writer James Baldwin (1924-1987) created an important body of fiction and nonfiction, including The Fire Next Time. A New York City native, Baldwin moved to France as a young man and wrote powerfully about race in America. Considered one of the most important literary voices of the twentieth century, Baldwin influenced many of the writers of this anthology. Emily Raboteau, Jesmyn Ward, and Daniel José Older quote Baldwin in their essays, and Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah describes her admiration for Baldwin’s work in “The Weight.” 

Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old, unarmed black male, was shot by white neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in February 2012. Jesmyn Ward begins the Introduction with her grief and confusion after Martin’s death, and several other pieces mention him as well. Martin’s death was among the first in a series of similar incidents during the 2010s; it provoked widespread national protests and helped inspire the Black Lives Matter movement.  

Staten Island resident Eric Garner died July 17, 2014, after an NYPD officer choked him on the street. Bystanders filmed Garner’s death, and his statement “I can’t breathe” spread throughout the resistance of Black Lives Matter. Several of the pieces in The Fire This Time refer to Garner, including Jericho Brown’s poem “The Tradition.” 

White police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. The incident inspired intense protests in Ferguson and elsewhere that railed against police brutality. Michael Brown became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement, although as Claudia Rankine notes, his family members had a complicated relationship with his highly public death. 

Barack Obama, elected in 2008, was the 44th President of the United States and the first black man to hold that office. Edwidge Danticat, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Kevin Young, among others, discuss President Obama’s importance in their essays. Carol Anderson sees a loop of progress reaching its peak at his election, followed by a swift downturn, while Jackson discusses the composite fathers who raised Obama. 

On June 17, 2015, a white gunman named Dylann Storm Roof killed nine black church members at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. While many of the anthology’s essays mention the Charleston shooting, Kevin Young and Claudia Rankine pay particular attention to Roof and his white-supremacist beliefs (although, notably, Young omits his name). 

Rachel Dolezal, a white woman residing in Washington, lived as a black woman until she was publicly outed in 2015. Kevin Young’s essay considers the historical roots of her attempts to “pass” as black.