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diversity trainer, translator and editor of poco.lit.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffer’s first novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is extensive and demanding: The family history of the African American Ailey Pearl Garfield is traced back over several generations and reveals complicated family entanglements that are consequences of settler colonialism and enslavement.
more...Leila Mottley became the youngest author ever to make the Booker Prize longlist this year. Her novel Nightcrawling follows a protagonist, Kiara, who is only slightly younger and struggles to survive and find shelter in Oakland. This novel is important, but also heavy stuff!
more...The Impostor is an exciting book that offers insights into a complex reality. It is set in a time shortly after the end of apartheid; South Africa is in transition.
more...As part of our macht.sprache. project, we organized a workshop at the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin in early September 2022. This gave us the opportunity to speak with German and American studies scholar Marion Kraft about her translation work. We discussed Audre Lorde, linguistic changes, new translations and team translations.
more...In The Mermaid of Black Conch, Monique Roffey takes up the mermaid myth, sets the story in a small Caribbean fishing village, and negotiates not only colonial contexts but also centuries-old patriarchal traditions.
more...Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts takes readers into the near future of the USA. A world of oppression is countered by a certain gentleness, warmth and creativity.
more...Could this be love? is a bilingual anthology – all contributions are included in English and German – with personal essays on interracial relationships. It is one of the first books to be published by the newly founded InterKontinental Verlag.
more...Black Cake is Charmaine Wilkerson’s moving debut novel in which two estranged siblings, Byron and Benny, must come to terms with their mother’s death and their hidden past.
more...Tomi Obaro’s debut novel Dele Weds Destiny appealed to me with its beautiful, flashy cover and the prospect of a story about girlfriends. The book with its simple prose and predictable characters was welcome company on a very hot beach day.
more...Judith Coffey and Vivien Laumann critique that antisemitism and Jewish perspectives have thus far often been elided in intersectional debates. At the end of 2021, they published their book Gojnormativität (Goynormativity) to make Jewish positions more speakable and visible. We had the privilege of talking to Judith Coffey about the book.
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