A conversation on Black Cool with Rebecca Walker, Margo Jefferson, and Miles Marshall Lewis

Black Cool explores the ineffable state and aesthetic of Black Cool. From the effortless reserve of Miles Davis in khakis on an early album cover, to the shock of resistance in black women's fashion from Angela Davis to Rihanna, to the cadence of poets as diverse as Staceyann Chin and Audre Lorde, Black Cool looks at the roots of Black Cool and attempts to name elements of the phenomena that have emerged to shape the global expectation of cool itself.  Rebecca Walker, editor of the anthology, will be joined by Margo Jefferson and Miles Marshall Lewis, contributors to the book.

Rebecca Walker is the author of the memoirs Black, White and Jewish and Baby Love and the editor of the anthologies To Be Real, What Makes a Man, and One Big Happy Family. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post Book World, Newsweek, Glamour, Vibe, and Interview among other publications.

Margo Jefferson is a New York–based cultural critic. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and published On Michael Jackson in 2006. She’s written and performed two theater pieces and is working on a second book. She teaches writing at Columbia University and Eugene Lang College. Looking back, she feels she has spent too much time being a Good Negro Girl and not enough being a Willful Negro Eccentric.

Miles Marshall Lewis has been an editor at Vibe, XXL, and BET and written for the Huffington Post, Salon, Essence, the Believer, and many other publications. He is the author of the novel Irrésistible; a biography on Sly and the Family Stone, called There’s a Riot Goin’ On; and Scars of the Soul Are Why Kids Wear Bandages When They Don’t Have Bruises, a collection of essays. He lives in Manhattan. Instead of the more predictable Coltrane, Lewis named his youngest son Kalel, after Superman, the last son of Krypton. MML blogs at his site, www. furthermucker.com.

Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness (Paperback)

By Rebecca Walker, Jr. Gates, Henry Louis

$14.95

ISBN-13: 9781593764173
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Soft Skull Press, 2/2012

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