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

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.

by Emile DeWeaver A friend asked me what advice might I give students about living with Trump’s administration.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

by Emile DeWeaver

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.