For Your Listening Pleasure…
August 19th, 2008 by jules
A fabulous conversation with Walter Dean Myers—and his work with teens—at NPR this morning:
“The kids were writing such negative stuff about themselves that I began to collect photographs to show how beautiful they actually were,” he says. “I used the photographs in a number of different books.”
Myers also looks back to when he was a young man in Harlem who knew he wanted to write — and meeting Langston Hughes for the first time. Having studied only white, British writers in schools, he tells NPR’s Juan Williams, “He didn’t look to me like a writer because he wasn’t white.” …It’s a great piece. Enjoy.
Now back to your regularly scheduled blog-reading.
How oddly coincidental. I just watched a Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode for the first time last night that had Sisko going back in time (in his mind) and experiencing the prejudices of being a black writer in a world that assumed that the actual writer of his stories was white. Interesting.