Celebrating the Birthday of Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
Two years after the Detroit riots (also known as the the 12th Street Riot, the 1967 Rebellion and the Uprising of 1967), and one year after the assassination of...
Category: Musings
Where Is The Love? Reflections On Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
When we were children in the 1960s and 1970s, family who had migrated from the south to cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis made annual ca...
True Names: Reflecting on Lost Lives
“Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.”** I am in pain over our nation’s ...
Memory of First Reads
Note from Leslie: Clicking on colored text will allow you to discover more about that item! One of my early memories is of receiving books in the mail beginning...
“My Friend Victoria”: Finding Value in Uncomfortable Readings & Viewings Part Two
PART TWO (Read PART ONE) The farther away I get from my first impressions of this story the more it becomes other things. Is this what happened when Jean Paul C...
“My Friend Victoria”: Finding Value in Uncomfortable Readings & Viewings
PART ONE I am having difficulty thinking about the film “My Friend Victoria” and the Doris Lessing novella “Victoria and the Staveneys,” from which the film was...
Tearful Reunion With Some Classics
Oh! How is your summer going? I also mean: goodness gracious but I hope you have had some fun and/or a vacation and things like that….! ….found myse...
“Yellow” a musing by Leslie Reese
when changes hurt I am reminded that I am lonely. a dandelion still yellow after the others have turned catches my eye. a look skyward makes me wonder: how many...
Winter 2015
When I was doing graduate work in interdisciplinary arts at Columbia College Chicago, Little Leslie came forward with memories from my childhood. For a while he...