
Telling This With a Sigh
by Emile DeWeaver
As a black person, my first reaction to “reverse discrimination” is a tightening of my insides.

Justice in the Weeds
by Emile DeWeaver
I admire science fiction authors for their ability to study society’s poisonous weeds and forecast the toxic futures we face should those weeds run wild.

Resistance and Catharsis: Changing the Focus
by Emile DeWeaver
A friend asked me what advice might I give students about living with Trump’s administration.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
by Emile DeWeaver
Watching the coverage of the Ghost Ship fire that struck my hometown of Oakland, I’m struck by how, as a nation, we play the blame game.

Adventures in Library Standing
by Emile DeWeaver
I have this thing I do when I see a book lying unattended. I check the copyright page to see what printing the book is in, and then I read the first sentence of the first chapter.

A Weapon of Mass Satisfaction
by Emile DeWeaver
Someone was about to perform a musical, and while Les Miserables and childhood memories of The Sound of Music have seeded some appreciation for the genre, a musical is hardly something I’d shirk work to watch.

Blasphemy
by Emile DeWeaver
A poet held a workshop in San Quentin and told the class, “We shouldn’t fool ourselves. Poetry is not going to change the world.”

The Cure for Broken Noses
by Emile DeWeaver
I think we are off course, mainly because I hear very few people arguing the obvious. We need to stop locking up so many people; we need to stop giving people prison terms that amount to civil death certificates because the practice is wrong.

In Memory of Prince
by Emile DeWeaver
I’m not sentimental, so it surprised me that Prince’s death struck me as much as the death of a family member would have. My cellmate woke me up to break the news, and I began my denial stage by grunting and returning to sleep.

Here and Now
by Emile DeWeaver
I don’t subscribe to happily ever afterlives. They’re too shiny. Shiny promises defrauded my father into poverty, so I tend to parse them the same way that philosophers parse theories of mind.

Human Value
by Emile DeWeaver
Perhaps my humanities friends had a dad like mine whose response to artistic aspirations was, “Heck no, Emile. It’s hard enough to be black; you’re not going to be a black painter.”

Homo Absurdis
by Emile DeWeaver
I like to think I learn a lot about a person by reading their work, so I’m not surprised when people tell me Jonathan Franzen is an asshole.

Consequences
by Emile DeWeaver
The simple answer to how I ended up in prison is that I chose to commit a crime, but nobody reads monthly columns to discover the obvious.

The Butterfly Effect
by Emile DeWeaver
I can be a cultist when it comes to good books that blow my mind. I persuade friends and strangers alike to read them, then wait for them to return with gleaming eyes.

Elephants and Televisions
by Emile DeWeaver
It can be uncomfortable to acknowledge, but criminals, even murderers, are people. Though their actions are reprehensible, they, in general, act out of very human motivations.