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Movies and Scholarly Journal Book Reviews, Poems, Children’s Books, Short Stories and Essays

Movies and Scholarly Journal Book Reviews, Poems, Children’s Books, Short Stories and Essays are my writing genres.  My audience is readers of diversity literature.  I remind you of this as I celebrate the ANNIVERSARY of my author’s website and blog.

I’m also updating  the status of my short story Who Would Kill My Mother?, which I submitted to the Chicago Tribune ‘s Nelson Algren Literary Contest.  The story was declined in July.  (Ouch)

But the Winter/Spring 2018, The Journal of African American History, Volume 103, Number 1/2, published my book review of Black Woman Reformer:  Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism by Sarah L. Silkey.   You can find it in The Journal beginning on page 233.

The following is an excerpt from the review:

Wells celebrated the success of her transatlantic campaigns in her book a Red Record, published in 1895.  In Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching and Transatlantic Activism, Silkey documents and assesses Wells’s contribution to the lynching debate that would continue well into the twentieth century and makes it clear that in the United States and Britain, Wells’s reporting and speeches on lynching shaped how the late nineteenth-century public, and twenty-first-century historians, understand and interpret lynching.

Note:  The Journal of African American History is published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of The Association For The Study of African American Life and History – ASALH.  ASALH is holding it’s 103rd Annual Meeting and Conference October 3-7, 2018 in Indianapolis Marriott downtown.  Theme:  African Americans in Times of War.

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Featured

First blog post of mitchellworks. The creative writing blog of Lana Jean Mitchell. Here I will post in addition to my writings my activities in marketing, selling and creating those writings. I will discuss your comments about my writings as well as questions you or I raise as result of our interactions, my activities, or that come up in the course of my creative endeavors. I might discuss the fact that I was selling poetry and my children’s book, A Birthday Story, at a multiculture market, yesterday, Sunday, September 5, 2016 here where I reside in the city of Des Moines, Iowa. I sent a letter of congratulations to the Des Moines Public Library today. The library is celebrating its 150th anniversary. (I visit the library both online and in the brick and mortar buildings quite often.) I have a Facebook page where I also post. I plan to link the pages. I thought about the page because I also post there. I’ve got old post that might interest you. Bye!

This is the post excerpt.

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.

post

Iowa Banned Books Week October 1st – October 10th

The Iowa House of Representatives has declared October 1st through October 10th, “Banned Books Week.” The article I read did not say why the 1st through the 10th.

The week is being observed by readings of Banned Books.

You can see the list of 50 of the banned books on https://www.rd.com.

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A Dirge

This dirge is written for the loss of the movie reviews that are no longer a part of my files. My computer craved the capacity to download papers and files for my seminars at The Union Institute and University. It, the computer, got wild because it ran out of places to put the words, the pictures, and other characters.

The reviews dated back to 2013 so I haven’t, as of yet, deleted any recent reviews. And I will probably write another or two. But this dirge it for those that were crushed by the computer. Ever heard the sound of the waste bin? Like broken glass when it deletes a file. No trumpets or horns or drums or silent marchers, just a sound like broken glass.

A Historical Work on Enslavement

A Documentary History of Slavery in Berbice 1796-1834 is a 2002 copyright work by Alvin O. Thompson.

A British slave colony from 1796-1834 Berbice, present day Guyana, is in northeastern South America. During 1796-1834 it was a colony, first of the Dutch and lastly the British.

Professor Alvin O. Thompson is a prolific writer of historical works about slavery, which was centered in the Caribbean and South America.

“My decision to produce this work [A Documentary History of Slavery in Berbice 1796-1834] was motivated primarily by the great shortage of published materials on Guyana, and especially on Berbice, during the slavery period. It was also motivated by my observations that large number of important documents on various aspects of slavery in the Anglophone Caribbean remain inaccessible to the average reader-the person who has no time or inclination to plough through published and unpublished contemporary records, often in obscure places. For instance, I discovered that the slave code of 1826, one of the most important documents on Berbice slavery, could not be located readily in Guyana.”1

1p.xiii

A Documentary History of Slavery in Berbice 1796-1834 has been followed by Economic Parasitism: European rule in West Africa 1880-1960 in 2006, and Confronting Slavery: Breaking through the Corridors of Silence. Thompson Business Service, Incorporated, Barbados, 2010.

If you are interested in copies or a copy of one of Professor Alvin O. Thompson’s work, please leave contact information in the comment section.

by Lana Jean Mitchell

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Grand View University “Upcoming Event- Maybe” Update

The program “Stories to Tell My Daughters” scheduled for Grand View University, Des Moines, IA, this past Sunday, March 15, 2020, was canceled as I speculated. The coronavirus got it too. A rescheduling is possible. I’ll let you know if and when I know. Maybe you are also interested?

Upcoming Event – Maybe

Sunday, March 15th, 2020, Grandview University, here in Des Moines, Iowa is hosting the following event, “Stories to Tell My Daughter.” The event will be held in the Viking Theatre.

Maybe!

The public program might get cancelled because of the coronavirous, I’m thinking, not Grand View.

Grand View is located at 1200 Grand View Avenue. I’ll be there at 4:00p.m. start time.

If it happens.

The 2020 AVID Authors

The 2020 AVID Series sponsored by the Des Moines Public Library Foundation brings prominent national and international authors to central Iowa for free speaking engagements each spring.

This year’s authors are:

Tayari Jones, An American Marriage

Hanif Abdurraqib, It Is A Love Letter To A Group, A Sound, And An Era. It Is Called Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest

David Baldacci, Walk The Wire

Kate Quinn, The Huntress

Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl

Brad Meltzer, The Lincoln Conspiracy

Jacqueline Woodson, Red At The Bone

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What I Really Know About The Vote

What I Really Know About The Vote, is an essay I wrote several years ago but never published.   The 2018 mid- term elections will be held this coming November.  I’m posting the essay to help the get out the vote effort.

Introduction

What I really know about the vote is that it is “ground” won.  The ground in this instance is the right to vote.  It has been won like the ground in a battle, the taking of Concord, Massachusetts during the Revolutionary War, for example.

The right to vote in the United States had to be won, by all of the groups who currently have the right to vote.  The place, once won, where you can defend your rights as a citizen.

The Original Voters in the United States

The original voters in the United States were the landed gentry.  Typically white males who were property owners. When they won the Revolutionary War against the British, they gave themselves the right to vote, remember.  Ground won.

 The 13th, 14th & 15th Amendments to the US Constitution

African American males, 18 years of age and older, and non propertied males, with the exception of those on the reservations, were the next group to win the right to vote.  The ratified 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution gave them the right after  protest and  participation in the United States Civil War. Ground won.  Women attempted to gain the right during this time but were not successful.

Women

Women, 18 years old and older,  gained the right after years of protest and the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution in 1920.  Ground won.

The ground won, (the vote) is thrown away when you don’t vote.  Voting may not do all you want it to do,  but all ground won doesn’t always win the war either, but it holds what you have won, in this case your right to have your voice heard.

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Recidivism

“Recidivism” – habitual or chronic relapse. “Recidivism” is the title of one of my original poems. Below, I’m citing a few lines from the poem.
Before that, a relevant quote from Aime’Ce’saire (6-26-19 to 4-17-2008) Francophone and French poet, author and politician from the Caribbean island of Martinique.
“Emancipating ones self (sic) from what has been by transforming it
and giving it a new strength. It is the hour of metamorphosis
and transformation.” (the red hour expression in “And the dogs
were silent”).

When a girl,

I became acquainted

With the recidivism

Of extended family,

Neighbors and classmates.

I pondered

The cause for

The return to a road

That leads to another “stint”

In an institution erected to house,

Those, who when free

Plan their future,

With a sentence that begins,

“When I get back to

San Quentin, Leavenworth, jail,

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