Mixed Race Studies

Novelist Heidi Durrow Looks Up [Book Review]

Hot Metal Bridge: a literary magazine
Published by the University of Pittsburgh
2010-02-15

Liberty Hultberg

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow
(Algonquin, January 2010)

Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.

Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black…

Read the entire review here.

An Interview with Lise Funderburg

Hot Metal Bridge: published by Writing MFA students at the University of Pittsburgh
Spring 2009 (All The Way Down)

Interview by Liberty Hultberg

Lise Funderburg is the author of Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk About Race and Identity (1994) and the memoir Pig Candy (2008), which has been described as part memoir, part travelogue, and part social history, about race, mortality, filial duty…and barbecue. She has written numerous articles for publications including O Magazine, Self Magazine. She is a creative writing instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and resides in Philadelphia.

HMB: What prompted you to write Pig Candy? At what point did you know this needed to be a book?

LF: My dad got sick and almost died. I was in my late thirties, and I realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t going to be around forever. He recovered fully from that incident, but I realized there were things about my father that I just didn’t know because he’d been a very close-to-the-vest kind of person growing up. I wanted to figure out who he was; he was a curious combination of disparate elements. He was hardworking and reliable and charming and funny and unpredictable and cantankerous and mean and abusive. He was a very strict father, but in some ways he didn’t care about formalities at all. So who was this man and what made him tick?

I thought: Here’s this guy who’s so different from me demographically. He’s a man born in the twenties right before the Great Depression into the Jim Crow South in Monticello, a rural Georgia town. He grew up Black, and I grew up a mixed race girl in the integrated North in an urban environment during Civil Rights. There’s so much about what shaped his life that I don’t know anything about and how will I find this out? So I started to interview him. I was already a journalist, so I had this idea that maybe it was a book, but I didn’t really know what form the book was going to take. I interviewed him on safe subjects, which were his jobs; he was such a hardworking person that I thought this was something he’ll talk to me about, and it wouldn’t have the goopy, unpleasant (to him) qualities of emotion…

Read the entire interview here.

Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out

Inanna Publications
November 2010
250 pages
ISBN-10: 1926708148
ISBN-13: 978-1-926708-14-0

Edited by

Adebe De Rango-Adem (Adebe D. A.)

Andrea Thompson

This anthology of poetry, spoken word, fiction, creative non-fiction, spoken word texts, as well as black and white artwork and photography, explores the question of how mixed-race women in North America identify in the twenty-first century. Contributions engage, document, and/or explore the experiences of being mixed-race, by placing interraciality as the center, rather than periphery, of analysis. The anthology also serves as a place to learn about the social experiences, attitudes, and feelings of others, and what racial identity has come to mean today.

Adebe De Rango-Adem recently completed a research writing fellowship at the Applied Research Center in New York, where she wrote for ColorLines, America’s primary magazine on race politics. She has served as Assistant Editor for the literary journal Existere, and is a founding member of s.t.e.p.u.p.—a poetry collective dedicated to helping young writers develop their spoken word skills. Her poetry has been featured in journals such as Canadian Woman Studies, The Claremont Review, Canadian Literature, and cv2. She won the Toronto Poetry Competition in 2005 to become Toronto’s first Junior Poet Laureate, and is the author of a chapbook entitled Sea Change (2007). Her debut poetry collection, Ex Nihilo, will be published in early 2010.

Andrea Thompson is a performance poet who has been featured on film, radio, and television, with her work published in magazines and anthologies across Canada. Her debut collection, Eating the Seed (2000), has been featured on reading lists at the University of Toronto and the Ontario College of Art and Design, and her spoken word CD, One, was nominated for a Canadian Urban Music Award in 2005. A pioneer of slam poetry in Canada, Thompson has also hosted Heart of a Poet on Bravo tv, CiTr Radio’s spoken word show, Hearsay. In 2008, she toured her Spoken Word/Play Mating Rituals of the Urban Cougar across the country, and in 2009 was the Poet of Honour at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word.

Table of Contents (Thanks to Nicole Asong Nfonoyim)

• Acknowledgements
• Preface – Carol Camper
• Introduction – Adebe DeRango-Adem and Andrea Thompson1
• RULES/ROLES
  • Enigma – Andrea Thompson
  • Blond- Natasha Trethewey
  • Mixed- Sandra Kasturi
  • pick one – Chistine Sy and Aja
  • My Sista, Mi Hermana – Phoenix Rising
  • little half-black-breed – Tasha Beeds
  • “White Mask” – Jordan Clarke
  • “Nothing is just black or white” – Jordan Clarke
  • Roll Call – Kirya Traber
  • What Am I? – Marijane Castillo
  • Casting Call: Looking for White Girls and Latinas – D.Cole Ossandon
  • Conversations of Confrontation – Natasha Morris
  • “why i don’t say i’m white”- Alexis Kienlen
  • “Confession #8” – Mica Lee Anders
  • “Other Female” – Mica Lee Anders
  • “MMA and MLA” – Mica Lee Anders
  • The Pieces/Peace(is) in Me – monica rosas
  • Generation Gap (Hawaiian Style) – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • The Incident that Never Happened – Ann Phillips
  • In the Dark – Anajli Enjeti-Sydow
  • ananse vs. anasi (2007) – Rea McNamara
  • Contamination-  Amber Jamilla Musser
  • A Mixed Journey From the Outside In – Liberty Hultberg
  • What Are You? – Kali Fajardo-Anstine
  • One Being Brown – Tru Leverette
  • One for Everyday of the Week – Michelle Lopez Mulllins
  • Savage Stasis – Gena Chang-Campbell
  • The Half-Breed’s Guide to Answering the Question – M. C. Shumaker
  • My Definition – Kay’la Fraser
  • Pop Quiz – Erin Kobayashi
• ROOTS/ROUTES
  • Melanomial – Sonnet L’Abbe
  • half-breed – Jonina Kirton
  • “Inca/Jew” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • Open Letter – Adebe DeRango Adem
  • Prism Woman – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Southern Gothic – Natasha Trethewey
  • The Drinking Gourd- Miranda Martini
  • Reflection – Jonina Kirton
  • “Untitled” White Sequence – Cassie Mulheron
  • “Untitled” Black Sequence – Cassie Mulheron
  • Mapping Identities – Gail Prasad
  • Whose Child Are You? – Amy Pimentel
  • From the Tree – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • My sister’s hair – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • I, too, hear the dreams – Peta Gaye-Nash
  • Learning to Love Me – Michelle Jean-Paul
  • A Conversation among Friends – Nicole Salter
  • The Combination of the Two – Rachel Afi Quinn
  • “Loving Series: Elena Rubin” – Laura Kina
  • On the Train – Naomi Angel
  • Coloured – Sheila Addiscott
  • Of Two Worlds – Christina Brobby
  • What is my Culture? – Karen Hill
  • mo’oku’auhau (Genealogy) – ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui
  • Siouxjewgermanscotblack [cultural software instructions] – Robin M. Chandler
  • “Loving Series: Shoshanna Weinberger” – Laura Kina
  • A Hairy Situation – Saedhlinn B. Stweart-Laing
  • “Pot Vida” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • Songs Feet Can Get – Rage Hezekiah
  • Opposite of Fence – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • Applique – Lisa Marie Rollins
  • Blanqueamiento – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • The Land – Farideh de Bossett
  • Native Speaker: Daring to Name Ourselves – Nicole Asong Nfonoyim
• REVELATIONS
  • Colour Lesson I – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Concealed Things – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • Serendipity – Priscila Uppal
  • “Ultramarine” – Margo Rivera-Weiss
  • before i was this – Katherena Vermette
  • Firebelly – Andrea Thompson
  • From Chopsticks to Meatloaf and Back Again – Jasmine Moy
  • My Power – Sonnet L’Abbe
  • Whitewashed – Kathryn McMillan
  • Actually, I’m Black – Marcelite Failla
  • “Self” – Lisa Walker
  • Grey (A Bi-racial Poem) – Sonya Littlejohn
  • Nubia’s Dream – Mica Valdez
  • both sides – Jonina Kirton
  • Mulatto Nation – Marika Schwandt
  • Colour Lesson II – Adebe DeRango-Adem
  • racially queer femme – Kimberly Dree Hudson
  • mypeople – Ruha Benjamin
  • My Life in Pieces – Jennifer Adese
  • Burden of Proof: From Colon-Eyes to Kaleidoscope – Angela Dosalmas
  • Recipe for mixing – Tomie Hahn
  • Metamorphosis – Gena Chang-Campbell
  • The Land Knows – Shandra Spears Bombay
  • Land in Place: Mapping the Grandmother – Joanne Arnott
  • “I am the leaf, you are the leaf” – Lisa Walker
  • Language and the Ethics of Mixed Race – Debra Thompson
  • Hybrid Identity and Writing of Presence – Jackie Wang
• Contributors Notes