The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

Now, some half-century later, we are again at the precipice. Jesmyn Ward has pulled together in this collection you now hold the incisive, sage, angry and deeply complex voices of a new generation, responding to many of the same questions that confronted us in 1963. What do we do, this post-Civil Rights generation, in the face of the same injustice, dressed in different clothes, coded in different laws? In The Fire This Time, a new generation of black writers speak with the ‘fierce urgency of now.’”—Ayana

"Still on My Mind" according to Sarah. "The world is before you," I want to tell my daughters, "and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in." --Edwidge Danticat "Message to My Daughters"'The Fire This Time' is a timely, necessary collection of essays on the varied dimensions of Blackness in the contemporary U.S. Divided into three sections--legacy (the past), reckoning (the present), and jubilee (the future)--the compilation not only dedicates time to dissecting white rage, the sickness th. "A dynamite collection of tinglingly good work" according to Ben Mattlin. A thoughtful, moving, and important collection of essays, poems, and other heartfelt reactions to the current state of race relations in the U.S., this should become required reading for all civics and American literature scholars. (I mean that as a compliment.) As a middle-aged white dude myself, I didn't get all the pop-culture references and some of the African-American dialectical flourishes, but I've come away from this book with a new, deeper understanding of what . "A Great Collection" according to NN0S7M8. I purchased tickets to see Jesmyn Ward at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, so in preparation, I read this book. It was only fitting that I read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time before diving in. I have quite a few of Ward's books, but I haven't yet read them. This book was my introduction to her work. I am officially a fan. I wholeheartedly believe James Baldwin would be proud of this collection of essays. It was exactly what my soul needed when more and more it seems t

Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and was a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. . She is also the author of the memoir, Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Pri

We’ve made significant progress in the fifty-odd years since Baldwin’s essays were published, but America is a long and painful distance away from a “post-racial society”—a truth we must confront if we are to continue to work towards change. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify” (USA TODAY).In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most original thinkers and writers to speak on contemporary racism and race, including Carol Anderson, Jericho Brown, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin Young, Claudia Rankine, and Honoree Jeffers. “An absolutely indispensable anthology” (Booklist, starred review), The Fire This Time shines a light on the darkest corners of our history, wrestles with our curr