American Book Award Research Articles

An Interview with Ana Castillo

Chicago novelist, poet, editor, translator, coiner of the term xicanisma,' Ana Castillo is the author of four collections of poetry, three novels, one collection of short stories, and one collection of essays. Her fourth novel, Peel My Love like an Onion, will be published this year by W.W. Norton, as will her next collection of poetry. Castillo's first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters,2 received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for presentation at bookfairs in Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, and elsewhere. Her next novel, Sapogonia,3 was sprawling political work which showed great promise but suffered from lack of editing. But it was her So Far from God,4 novel that documented the spiritualism of the Chicano communities of northern New Mexico, that brought Castillo international critical acclaim. The Los Angeles Times raved that So Far from God was the U.S. equivalent of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Washington Post called it a hymn to the endurance of women.5 Similar praise was forthcoming from Latin America and Europe, making Castillo one of the best-known American authors outside of the U.S.

Evoking the "Holy and the Horrible": Conversations with Joyce Carol Thomas

Joyce Carol Thomas is a poet, novelist, and playwright. Through these three modes of perceiving the world - the poet's spare, sharp-edged wonder; the playwright's cunning orchestration of incident and character; and the novelist's urge to bring us smack-face against life's pain, joy, and recoveries - she evokes dilemmas and struggles which open the way to a better sense of self and often to a glorious personal epiphany. In whatever genre she's keyed to at the moment, Thomas peels back layers of life's complexities by focusing largely on the contradictions, catastrophes, and spiritual triumphs that unfold in a rural African American community. With this community serving as her frame, she constructs lean but expressive portraits of the destructive and redemptive power of love, explores the values and meanings of secular and religious traditions, and lays out stormy initiations for her young black protagonists. Rich in ambiguity and mystery, and steeped in mythical and religious tropes and metaphors, her writing resonates with a wonderfully bracing music. Thomas was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma, the setting for three of her novels: Marked by Fire (1982), Bright Shadow (1983), and The Golden Pasture (1986). Throughout much of her childhood, she was a migrant farm worker, first in Oklahoma and later in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where her family moved when she was ten years old. She traces her love of language and story to the songs and tales of her Mexican co-workers and the expressive rhythms of those who testified at church services. She earned degrees in Spanish and French and taught foreign languages in public schools before pursuing a career as a writer. She has also held positions in English literature and creative writing at Purdue University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Tennessee. In the 1970s, Thomas wrote poetry and plays for adults. Critical acclaim began in 1982 with Marked by Fire, her first novel. In addition to the National Book Award for young-adult fiction, Marked by Fire received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and Booklist's children's Reviewers Choice Award. The title also was listed on numerous best-book lists, including the New York Times Outstanding Books of the Year and the ALA's Best Books for Young Adults. Bright Shadow, the sequel to Marked by Fire, was named a Coretta Scott King Honor Award Book. Awards and honors have continued. Both A Gathering of Flowers, an anthology of multiethnic and multiracial short stories, which Thomas edited in 1990, and Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea (1993), a collection of her poems, were among the titles recommended for children and young adults by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Brown Honey in Broomwheat Tea also received the Coretta Scott King Honor Book Award and was listed as a Notable Children's Book in the Social Studies by the National Council for Social Studies/Children's Book Council joint committee. Joyce Carol Thomas spoke to us by phone from her home in Berkeley, California, in September and December, 1995, and in June, 1996. This interview is a composite of these conversations. Interviewers: Would you share something of your growing up in Oklahoma? Have significant people, events, and places found their way into your writing? Thomas: I grew up in Ponca City, where my family lived on the black side of town. There was a park dividing the black side from the white side, and to get to the white side or downtown you had to walk through that park. For the first several years of my life I rarely went over to that part of town. So you see, this Oklahoma community was a very sheltered place for me. It doesn't surprise me at all that in my writing I am deeply concerned with what happens within a community and how these experiences form a person's vision of the world. The forces within the community interest me more than other circumstances and far more than forces from outside the community. …

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

Winner of the 1996 American Book Award and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship Americans have lost touch with their history, and in this thought-provoking book, Professor James Loewen shows why. After surveying twelve leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past. In ten powerful chapters, Loewen reveals that: The United States dropped three times as many tons of explosives in Vietman as it dropped in all theaters of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki Ponce de Leon went to Florida mainly to capture Native Americans as slaves for Hispaniola, not to find the mythical fountain of youth Woodrow Wilson, known as a progressive leader, was in fact a white supremacist who personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations The first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts From the truth about Columbus's historic voyages to an honest evaluation of our national leaders, Loewen revives our history, restoring to it the vitality and relevance it truly possesses.

Book Reviews : Border Conditions and Women's LivesDebbie Nathan Women and Other Aliens: Essaysfrom the U.S.-Mexico Border (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1991) 168 pp. Sesshu Foster is the author of Angry Days (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1987) and the coeditor of Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1990), which won an American Book Award

Book Reviews : Border Conditions and Women's LivesDebbie Nathan Women and Other Aliens: Essaysfrom the U.S.-Mexico Border (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press, 1991) 168 pp. Sesshu Foster is the author of Angry Days (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1987) and the coeditor of Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1990), which won an American Book Award

An Interview with Linda Hogan

AN INTERVIEW WITH LINDA HOGAN Linda Hogan Linda Hogan is a prize-winning Native American poet, short story writer and novelist Uving in Colorado. Her books include Seeing Through the Sun, which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; the highly acclaimed novel, Mean Spirit; and most recently The Book of Medicines. She has a forthcoming novel. Solar Storm, a chapter from which originally appeared in 77ie Missouri Review and wül be reprinted in the upcoming Pushcart Prizes. This interview was conducted in January of 1992 in Columbia, Missouri, by the staff of The Missouri Review. An Interview with Linda Hogan Interviewer: Can we begin by talking about your background— where you grew up and the things that you did? Hogan: My fanuly is from Oklahoma, near Ardmore. My father had a job driving a woman to Denver and he ended up staying there. He met my mother and they got married and I was born in Denver. At that time my father was a carpenter. He later went into the miUtary to feed us, so we did some travelling around. Interviewer: When you were growing up, did you think of yourself as Native American? Hogan: I reaUy did. There are so many Indian miUtary people that having a miUtary fanuly did not in any way diminish that. Td forgotten how many minority people were in the mUitary until my father was in the Army hospital last year. Among others, an Aztec woman was working there: In some very strange way the military became an equal opportunity employer. The only way that many people could buy a pair of shoes or eat was to go into the Army. Interviewer: Did you grow up in a tribal community? Hogan: I was part of diverse communities. Most of my fanuly stül Uves in Oklahoma. I try to maintain my connection with my relatives there, but we did spend much of our time travelUng. My Uncle Wesley had moved to Denver before my father, and was working in the Indian community there. The community in Denver was mixed—there were some Navajo, but it was predominantly Lakota. During the 1950s Relocation Act a lot of Indians were moved into Denver and other urban areas like San Francisco, Chicago The Missouri Review · 111 and L.A. In fact, WiUa ManKüler grew up in San Frandsco. She's the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. During relocation her fanuly had been moved out of Oklahoma to San Frandsco. They moved people to the strangest places; the logic was reaUy beyond me. There's a Choctaw community in Chicago for that reason— they were moved there in the fifties. It seemed that the intent was to break connections of the native people to their homelands and communities. Interviewer: So we're stiU Uving with the various relocation acts of the thirties and fifties. Any thoughts on the connections among them? Hogan: What the United States thinks about tribal nations is a problem, a conflict. Tm not a historian, so I couldn't reaUy talk about the connections. Tm sure they are different in the case of each community. Ifs a compücated, large thing. Any attempt I would make to speak about it would be to minimize it, Tm sure. There is still an ongoing clash; now ifs even come down to Bingo, which is, interestingly enough, one of the few ways tribes have to make a Uving. Even where tribes are oU-rich or rich in other kinds of resources, like the Navajo people, the land and the coal mining has been leased out for pennies a year by crooked people. This is an ongoing problem that is stall with us, in every aspect. Interviewer: I know you've had quite a varied work experience. What are some of the things that you've done? Hogan: I began working full time when I was fifteen. I've been a nurse's aide, a teacher's aide, a cocktaü waitress—I've done just about anything I had to do to earn a Uving. I worked my way 112 · The Missouri Review Linda Hogan "At last in my life I...

Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora

William Branch, playwright and American Book Award winner, has compiled this collection of plays by contemporary Black dramatists from Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, and the United States. Though widely varied in themes, styles, and objectives, these plays proceed from an Afrocentric wellspring, expressing viewpoints and sentiments largely through the eyes of people of African origin or descent. anthology contains Death and the King's Horseman, by Wole Soyinka of Nigeria, 1986 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature; Edufa, by Efua Sutherland, Ghana's leading dramatist; Woza Albert! by Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, three of South Africa's most successful theater-makers; Pantomime, by Derek Walcott, 1992 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature; Sortilege II: Zumbi Returns, by Abdias do Nascimento, founder of the Afro-Brazilian movement; Slave Ship, by Amiri Baraka, mentor of the 1960s Black Arts movement; In Splendid Error, by William B. Branch, Emmy Award nominee; Joe Turner's Come and Gone, by August Wilson, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; and The Talented Tenth, by Richard Wesley, AUDELCO recipient.

Sifting Through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple

The Color Purple, the novel and the film, have both been the subject of intense opposition since the arrival of Alice Walker's book in 1982 and the release of Steven Spielberg's film in December 1985. On the surface, the dissension has centered on the image of black people in media. Both works present a negative portrait, proclaim some critics, of black men in particular and the black family in general. These kinds of protests are not new, for black people have fought against negative depictions in film in many instances; notable among them were protests against The Birth of a Nation (1915), The Green Pastures (1936), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Porgy and Bess (1959). The primary difference in the criticism of the contemporary film is that the outrage over the works is not unanimous. Black women and black men, for the most part, are split, and at times, at odds over the effect of the works on the condition of black people in this country. The nature of the debate over The Color Purple and the way it affected how the public received the film and produced a reading of it are the subjects of this investigation. There is, of course, a significant difference between the novel and the film, one being the work of a black woman, the other a mainstream media product constructed by a white male. There is also a critical difference in the way a novel and film are experienced. The reading experience is more personal and private, whereas watching a film, until it is released on videotape, involves sitting in a theater with many other people and being affected by their reactions. Although these are important differences between the Alice Walker book and the Spielberg film, the two works have become almost interchangeable in many people's minds. The novel won the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and was on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list for a number of weeks, but its impact was not as widespread as the film's. Although there were criticisms of the novel when it was published and there have long been attacks against Alice Walker, the protests accelerated in the wake of the film's release. The film reached an audience in several stages and each time induced a strong reaction. It was released during the holiday season in 1985, withdrawn from circulation in the fall of 1986, re-released theatrically at the beginning of 1987, and released on videotape July 1987. By October 1986 the film version of The Color Purple had made almost $100 million, and the rental of the videotape has been in the top twenty since its arrival in the video stores.1 It is therefore safe to assume that more people have seen the film than have read the book. It is also a sure bet that many people's perception of the novel is based upon what they have seen or heard about the film.

Romance, Marginality, Matrilineage: Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" and Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

The publication of The Color Purple transformed Walker from an indubitably serious black writer whose fiction belonged to a tradition of gritty, if occasionally magical, realism into a popular novelist, with all the perquisites and drawbacks attendant on that position. Unlike either The Third Life of Grange Copland (1970) or Meridian (1976), The Color Purple gained immediate and widespread public acceptance, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for 1982-83. At the same time, however, it generated immediate and widespread critical unease over what appeared to be manifest flaws in its composition. Robert Towers, writing in the New York Review of Books, concluded that on the evidence of The Color Purple Alice Walker still has a lot to learn about plotting and structuring what clearly intended to be a realistic novel. His opinion was shared by many reviewers, who pointed out variously that in the last third of the book the narrator-protagonist Celie and her friends are propelled toward a fairytale happy ending with more velocity than credibility; that the letters from Nettie, with their disconcertingly literate depictions of life in an African village, intrude into the middle of the main action with little apparent motivation or warrant; and that the device of the letters to God especially unrealistic inasmuch as it foregoes the concretizing details that traditionally have given the epistolatory form its peculiar verisimilitude: the secret writing-place, the cache, the ruses to enable posting letters, and especially the letters received in return.' Indeed, Walker's violations of realist convention are so flagrant that they might well call into question whether The Color Purple is clearly intended to be a realistic novel, especially as there are indications that at least some of those aspects of the novel discounted by reviewers as flaws may constitute its links to modes of writing other than Anglo-American nineteenth-century realism. For example, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has recently located the letters to God within an Afro-American tradition deriving from slave narrative, a tradition

A MELUS Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Ungston is the author of three books which integrate her ancestral Chinese tradition with American culture, life styles and literatures. The Woman Warrior, published in 1976, won a National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and was enthusiastically acclaimed. China Men, published in 1981, won the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, an encyclopedic novel, was published in 1989. Shortly after Tripmaster Monkey came out, Maxine Hong Kingston read at the Living Writers Series, which I coordinate at San Diego State University. We spent a rich day together, and this inteview is the result of our discussion. Reprinted with permission from the September, 1989, issue of Poetry Flash. Interviewer. The opening chapter of Tripmaster Monkey made me cry. Kingston: Really? I'm so glad. Interviewer: You're glad you made me cry? Kingston: Because everybody is saying it's tough, or they're saying, Wittman has such an obnoxious personality. I am so glad it brings out a softer emotion. Interviewer: Well, I recognize that squalor, that desperation. Being an unemployed poet, going through life in San Francisco where the immigrants are making their dream. I remember sitting in coffee shops, writing up my resume while the immigrants were out there working hard and buying their houses, working towards this |dream.' I said, how have I lost that dream? I recognize that desperation in Wittman. And those piles and piles of unfinished poems in the false bottom of his Gold Mountain Theater truck... Kingston: That dream that he's gonna be a poet. You know, lately I've met new immigrants that have been coming in, and they are so different than my parents. I've met a whole bunch of brand-new people who are musicians, and their strength and their music is so strong. They come here looking for part-time jobs. They don't want to open a restaurant or laundry, but they will take a menial job in a restaurant in order to practice their music. And their dream ... they've come here with the ancient instruments - their erh hus and yuehs [2 string fiddles and moon guitars], and they want to introduce American people to this music. And they think they can introduce those ancient instruments and make music and compose and make a career Interviewer: Let's talk about the opening chapter. Why Wittman Ah Sing ... and not Wilma Ah Lan? Why a male protagonist this time? That surprised me when I opened the book. I wasn't expecting a male protagonist. Kingston: Oh, many reasons. One of them is that my life as a writer had been a long struggle with pronouns. For 30 years I wrote in the first person singular. At a certain point I was thinking that I was self-centered and egotistical, solipsistic, and not very developed as a human being, nor as an artist, because I could only see from this one point of view. I was only interested in myself. So for 30 years I did that - all my poems, my prose, evexything that I wrote. And then in about the fourth chapter of The Woman Warrior I felt the claustrophobia of that very strongly. I thought I had to overcome this self-centeredness. I guess what I'm saying is that I think you can't write well unless you're a good human being. That you cannot fake wisdom, or good values, in a book. You have to be a good person in order to write that way. So about three-quarters of the way through The Woman Warrior I was thinking, I have to care about other people more than I do. And so, very artificially, I wrote a chapter that's done with an omniscient narrator. So I could use a third person. That's the chapter about my mother and her sister going to Los Angeles to reclaim that bigamist husband. Interviewer: That was a wonderful vignette. Kingston: I liked it because it really fell into place as a classical short story shape. …

Crossing Open Ground by Barry Lopez

Reviews 285 photographs show and notes explain the changes caused by a massive flash flood in early June, 1965. This flood rerouted the river and overnight formed a major rapid. Moreover, the accompanying notes point out the various geo­ logic formations visible in the frames as well as changes in vegetation, streambed deposition or erosion, and, in some cases, man-made intrusions like powerlines , reservoirs and buildings. In tandem, the images and notes provide much food for the student of western landscapes. In working from the original plates, Stephens and the U.S.G.S. cartog­ raphers, thanks to retouching and modern developing techniques, have made the originals appear better than ever before. Certainly in their own day, Beaman and Hillers never obtained images as crisp and clear as these. And besides the originals appearing in their bast light, Stephens’s black and white photographs are themselves first-rate. The over-all excellence of the original photographs and their importance in the history of photography is a point wellmade by the authors and by Bruce Babbitt in his Foreword. Beaman and Hillers especially deserve more recognition as giants of early western photog­ raphy, in the same company as Timothy O’Sullivan and W. H. Jackson. JIM ATON Southern Utah State College Crossing Open Ground. By Barry Lopez. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988. 208 pages, $17.95.) In the long history ofwriters who have crossed open ground and attempted to evoke the mystery and life there, Barry Lopez is certainly distinguishing himself as one of the best. In the twelve years since Desert Notes appeared, Lopez has published six books, most notably Of Wolves and Men and Arctic Dreams. Unbeknownst to some of his readers, during this same period Lopez has also published frequently in magazines such as Harper’s, Outside, Science, Antaeus, and Orion Nature Quarterly. Crossing Open Ground collects the best of those pieces, and enhances Lopez’s standing as one of our finest writers. These fourteen essays cover a wide range of subjects—sperm whales, stone horses, the Anasazi, children in the woods and so on—and mostly occur in the West. Despite the diversity of subject matter, each piece argues in some way that what’s being observed is both precious and mysterious. Thus, behind every sharp observation, every luminous metaphor, stands the notion that landscape and its inhabitants are infinitely more complex than anyone will ever know. And that in itself, Lopez would say, should inculcate in us a sense of awe, respect and humility. Moreover, this writer understands both the power of language (and he uses it extraordinarily well) and its inadequacy finally to grasp it all. When he says, “I had no finished answer,” after a long and fine discussion of the ethics of killing seals to study them, no shame hangs on those words. 286 Western American Literature While Lopez’s writing has earned considerable attention in this country— the Burroughs award for Of Wolves and Men, the American Book Award for Arctic Dreams, and recently a Guggenheim—perhaps other parts of the literary world should stand up and take notice of this writer and his kind of writing. For example, Nobel committees have for too long defined literature as largely poetry, fiction and drama. Why not acknowledge a non-fiction prose writer, especially one who begins with the idea that mankind’s future is indissolubly linked with the intricate fabric of landscape? Picking a Lopez or a Laurens van der Post or a Peter Matthiessen would only enhance, for this reader, the stature of such an award. Besides calling attention to an oft-neglected genre of writing, such recognition might help change, in parts of the world at least, a fundamental attitude of arrogance toward anything not strictly human. That thought would indeed comfort the author of Crossing Open Ground as he contemplates such acts as the killing of seals. JIM ATON Southern Utah State College Bison Books. University of Nebraska Press. Betzinez, Jason, with Wilbur Sturtevant Nye. I Fought With Geronimo. $19.95/$7.95. Gay, E. Jane. With the Nez Perces: Alice Fletcher in the Field, 1889-92. $7.95. Mattes, Merrill J. The Great Platte River Road...

What Do I Know? A Study of Mathematical Self-Awareness

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsPhilip J. DavisPhilip J. Davis received his Ph.D. from Harvard under Ralph Boas. He has taught at Harvard, Maryland, the University of Utah, and Brown. He was Chief, Numerical Analysis Section, National Bureau of Standards for five years. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1956–57. His extensive work in numerical analysis and applied mathematics includes the books Interpolation and Approximation (1963), Mathematics of Matrices (1964), Numerical Integration (with P. Rabinowitz, 1967), Circulant Matrices (1979). The Mathematical Experience, written jointly with Reuben Hersh of the University of New Mexico, won an American Book Award for the year 1983.Professor Davis received the 1960 Award in Mathematics of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the MAA Chauvenet Prize in 1963, and the Lester R. Ford Award of the MAA in 1982.