Fantasies, Realities, Margins & Postcards

 

Soul Jar, Thirty-one Fantastical Tales by Disabled Authors 

edited by Annie Carl with Foreword by Nicola Griffith 

fantasy 

Forest Avenue Press, October 2023 

from the introduction: 

Western society is beginning to understand, after centuries of ignorance, that the disabled community is like other minorities. We're made up of real people with real lives and real stories. 

The foreword, introduction, thirty-one stories divided into four thematic sections--Earth in Retrograde, Gone Astray, Wild Space, Creature Feature--acknowledgements, about the editor, contributors' biographies, and a reader's guide work in concert to mesmerize and entertain as they prove the essential premise stated in the foreword: Ableism is a crap story... What disables a person in our culture is not impairment but society's attitude to that impairment... We need to hear our own voices. Our strong, beautiful, ordinary, disabled voices... 

The voices in these stories sing some familiar and new tunes in original, provocative, fantastical and relatable compositions. 

Our Hidden Conversations 

What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity by Michele Norris 

non-fiction 

Simon & Schuster, January 2024 

"Race, Your Thoughts, 6 Words. Please send." 

An invitation. A challenge. A dare more daunting than composing Haiku. 

The responses contain multitudes of clever, insightful, provocative, amusing, furious, compassionate, simple, and complicated personal revelations, inquiries, and declarations.

A prologue, introduction, twelve chapters of interviews, essays, images and more, an epilogue, acknowledgements, gratitude passage, about the author, and image credits for the abundance of compelling photos map the path of this author's "magnificent detour" from an intention to writing "a  book about how Americans talk and think about race" during Pres. Barack Obama's political ascension to The Race Card Project. Our Hidden Conversations is an origin story that starts with the author's intriguing family and moves outward, eventually encompassing thousands of people and more than one-hundred countries. The project and the conversations continue. 

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