literature

As a young girl growing up in the west side of Chicago, Chaz Ebert was most notably two things: a voracious reader and a precocious entrepreneur. Both her mother, who worked at a publishing company at the time, and one of her sisters, who shaped Ebert’s reading tastes, were bookworms, and Ebert followed in their stead.

Historian, academic and writer Ibram X. Kendi, in collaboration with Joel Christian Gill, chair of MFA program in Visual Narrative at Boston University, this month released a graphic version of Kendi’s 2016 book, “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” 

Three women in an urban beauty salon scheme and plot against the manipulative owner to get their due in a madcap mix of social, romantic and material ambition. Everything, of course, goes terribly wrong but terribly funny in Dutch novelist Najoua Martin’s darkly comedic debut, which draws on Black beauty and barbershop humor.

Last Friday, the Banner sat down with Jeffrey Stewart, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke,” to discuss all things Black power and aesthetics, from Alain Locke’s contribution to the Harlem Renaissance to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Saturday Night Live” performance.

Small and soft-spoken, author Jesmyn Ward delivered a lecture that was both searing and tender on April 10 at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. True to its title, “Bearing Hope: The Stories We Tell Our Children to Survive,” her talk, one of this year’s Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Celebrity Lectures, which presents innovators in the arts, reflected on her intertwined endeavors as a story teller and mother.