Think of this website as a bookshelf with slender volumes you can take down whenever it suits you. Some of the entries are  interviews with writers. Some are excerpts from my books. Others are reports  on broader literary landscapes.  Some appear in both English and Spanish – the result of my travels in Latin America.  Occasionally, as in the poems by George Ella Lyon and R.M. Ryan, writers speak for themselves.

To receive notices of new pages (along with occasional reviews and commentaries that do not appear on the menu) sign up in the subscription block at the top right of the page.

To send comments to me or the writers interviewed, use the comment box below each entry.

About me: I am the author of three publishing histories that explore the complex relationships among writers and editors in times of dramatic social change: It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (Norton); Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (Norton), and Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (Manchester University Press). A fourth book, When We Were Young in Africa (Culicidae Press), tells the story of my own growing up in West Africa.  I served on the editorial board of  the Library of America’s Reporting Civil Rights and contributed essays to the Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America. I have also contributed articles to American Prospect, the Nation, the Progressive, Sierra, and other magazines and did stints as an editor at the Progressive and Mother Jones.

I have taught journalism at universities in Kentucky, California, and most recently, Indiana University, where I am a professor emerita of journalism.

For more details of my work as a writer, click here.

Write to me here: