The Language Lane

Every knowledgeable boxing fan has Sugar Ray Robinson rated among the top 5 boxers who ever competed. Many consider him, pound for pound,...

My introduction to the energetic, charismatic wordsmith DMX was in the winter of 1998. I, like many others, became familiar with him from...

Frank Money, despite his name, contends with more misfortune than any of Toni Morrison’s major male characters. There is the KKK-style...

They say numbers speak to you sometimes. Maybe they say buy a lottery ticket. It could be that simple, as it is with me and 306. That is...

In class yesterday, a perplexed student asked if Daniel Sullivan, a central character in Larry Duplechan’s Tangled Up in Blue, was Black....

When you reach for the new poetry volume by Ishmael Reed, you just wonder which varieties of wit will be on display. What is the poet who...

As a kid, one of my favorite movies was the 1989 boxing documentary Champions Forever. According to my parents, by the time I was about...

“Junior Boyd, I’m a little surprised at you on this vaccine situation.” Semple paused as he thought the call was dropping, but the...

Because he didn’t have speed and didn’t pinpoint well---touching the wrong letter a lot---Semple refrained from texting when he could get...

On the occasion of my ENGLISH 467 class discussing Richard Wright’s classic novel, I post this review of the most recent film version....

In 1986, approximately a decade before her death, Toni Cade Bambara declared at the National Black Writers Conference that African...

In a sociolinguistics class back in graduate school, Professor Roger Cayer told us about an article by James Woodward titled “Black...

Semple addressed the man sitting on the park bench in weather too chilly for deep contemplation. “You look a little depressed, Junior...

Cold wind whipped across the masks of the two men as they passed the police station out on the boulevard. “They delved into that topic...

Taught by Women: Poems as Resistance Language, New and Selected is a love letter, a Black valentine, by Haki R. Madhubuti to women of all...

Winning is one of those funny words that people use when they mean another word. I mostly noticed this in connection with sports events....

“Well, in being a virtuous leader, that’s where your ability to use the third liberal art of rhetoric comes into play. You must be a good...

“What’s up, Semple Jenkins. You’re moving pretty fast out here.” “Tryna get home with this stationery to finish this letter to my folks...

Only on rereading Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea for my course on African American Autobiography did I ponder name and geography...

Once I was at a composition conference headquartered in downtown Nashville. Some colleagues and I, having never seen Fisk University,...