Category: people

Danez Smith’s poetry is part of a movement, or so it feels. “This is a significant moment for poetry. We are meeting days after Ocean Vuong (gay, Vietnamese and a friend of Smith’s) won the TS Eliot prize, and it is tempting to think poetry is at a turning point, belatedly diversifying, relaxing its borders. The reality is that there is still a long way to go, but this is a flicker of intent, the poetic ghettoising becoming less flagrant. It’s a mainstream momentum.”

The board, Laura Raicovich said, was not very happy with the decision to close the museum for 2017’s presidential inauguration. Then “she recently proposed to the board that the museum — in collaboration with other institutions — consider becoming a kind of sanctuary space that connects immigrants with social services. ‘It was made very clear to me that that was not something that was of interest,’ she said.”

As an anarchist, she would have wanted a self-governing society, with gender and racial equality. She would have wanted respect for life-forms other than human. She would have wanted a child-friendly society, as opposed to one that imposes childbirth but does not care about the mothers or the actual children. Or so I surmise from her writing. But now Ursula K. Le Guin has died.

Which is not to say that all the ideas they had about sex in medieval Europe were scientifically or medically sound, mind you. But they weren’t exactly prudes.

A dedicated stage and screen performer – and an African-American woman who earned degrees from Bard College, London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and the Univ. of Minnesota in the 1960s – she won the Emmy for playing Matilda, the wife of Chicken George in the Alex Haley miniseries. She was nominated for a second Emmy for Backstairs at the White House and co-starred in the Oprah Winfrey production The Women of Brewster Place.

She took everything that might have hindered a lesser spirit and made it into a strength. As part of the New Wave in science fiction in the 1960s and ’70s, she and writers like Samuel R. Delany, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick brought sophisticated prose style and contemporary political and sexual questions into a genre that had often felt artless and blunt.

Comedy is a great unifier. I hear from people every day from both sides saying, “We don’t have the same beliefs, and, you know, I hate gay people and I hate white people and I hate black people and I’m an awful person—but I laughed at your video!”

In this adaptation from her Robert B. Silvers Lecture, the National Book Award-winning journalist uses the seven words that Centers for Disease Control researchers were warned to avoid to shape an examination of her own life and her moves across oceans, cultures, and gender boundaries.

“Now she has been clean for a year. [the photographer] … decided that she was strong enough for a new battle. That began recently when, in her most personal project yet, she publicly confronted OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, and that company’s longtime owners, who are also prominent art patrons: the descendants of Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, two of three physician brothers who built Purdue Pharma into a pharmaceutical behemoth.”

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. Several, including “The Left Hand of Darkness” — set on a planet where the customary gender distinctions do not apply — have been in print for almost 50 years. The critic Harold Bloom lauded Ms. Le Guin as “a superbly imaginative creator and major stylist” who “has raised fantasy into high literature for our time.”