#lashonda katrice barnett

[biandlesbianliterature]

Recall your first reading of a favorite book: pulse quickening with resonance, your fascination with this new, yet familiar, world fueled by desire to forfeit reality for another moment with characters who feel like old friends. That expansive, lingering ache when life calls you to set the book aside, and the heady rush of picking up where you left off in the pages. This is how I felt the first time I followed Janie through Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the intensity and depth of that adventure a singular event until recently when I met Miss Ivoe Williams in the pages of LaShonda Katrice Barnett’s breathtaking debut novel, Jam on the Vine. - Lambda Literary

Black Bi & Lesbian Book Recommendations: Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

[sfplhormelcenter]

For the last #fictionfriday of African American History Month 2018, we are highlighting the remarkable novel "Jam on the Vine" by LaShonda K. Barnett that brings African-American and queer history together. The main character, Ivoe Williams eventually flees the Jim Crow South with her family and settles in Kansas City, where she and her former teacher and lover, Ona, found the first female-run African-American newspaper, Jam on the Vine. In the throes of the Red Summer—the 1919 outbreak of lynchings and race riots across the Midwest—Ivoe risks her freedom and her life to call attention to the atrocities of racism as a witness in the disproportionate incarceration of black men.  Library Journal writes “In language both poetic and down-to-earth this compelling work of historical fiction about a black female journalist escaping Jim Crow laws of the South and fighting injustice in Kansas City through her reportage, will bring wider recognition to the role of the African American press in American history.” #blackhistorymonth #queerestlibraryever

[thecommonmag]

Launch week continues with this short story from Issue 14. Check it out on TC Online!

May 1958

A white woman, softly sobbing, was hoisted into the back of an ambulance. On direction from the state troopers, Harvell stood idly by. For the second time since he’d arrived, the woman said the girl’s parents were Claudine and Cordezar Brown of Greenwood, Indiana. By “the girl,” the white woman meant the body lying in the ditch, covered by a sheet. Harvell looked at the bus tracks; the skid marks a few yards away, left by the fugitive car; a pair of yellow shoes about a foot apart on the side of the road.

The bus chartered by Johnson County to deliver Greenwoodians to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had stopped because of a flat tire, said the badly shaken woman. The driver worried about people getting overheated. He said anybody who got too hot should get off the bus and stir around but not too far. It was the woman’s idea that they cross Highway 31, because she wanted a cigarette and didn’t think it polite to exhale in the vicinity of strangers. How could she not have seen that car? She whispered, head down. The girl was plotting on how to meet Pat O’Connor before the car struck her. “She was so excited to see him,” the woman said, on the verge of another cry.

“Shame,” said one of the troopers as the ambulance drove off. “She’s probably no more than twenty, twenty-one.” Harvell thought he was talking about the woman in the ditch, until the other trooper picked up that thought and carried it further. “Something like this gonna keep her shook up for a while. Plus, we’re likely not to catch the heel who did it.” The troopers thought it was an indication of the changing times that a couple of women had taken Friday off of work for the Indy 500. Women could like racing, but generally as a complement to their husbands’ or sons’ real interest. Harvell looked again at the yellow shoes; he liked them, which meant he probably would’ve liked the woman in the ditch covered by a sheet. 

Read the rest here!

[loveisofthebody-blog]

She was no writer; she was a reader who ingested too many words, some of which spilled out, leaving a mess.

LaShonda Katrice Barnett, from Jam on the Vine It's not marketed as YA, but if you're interested in a wlw historical coming of age novel about a black female journalist in the Jim Crow South, this is wonderful so far.

[blacklesbianbooks]

Congratulations to Lashonda Katrice Barnett, a 2016 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in the Lesbian Fiction category for Jam on the Vine. Read about her novel in Sistahs on the Shelf’s Top Books of 2015 post: http://sistahsontheshelf.com/?p=6412

[writingactivism]

Join the Pratt MFA Writing Activism series this coming Wednesday in the Women Writers of Color Reading Room for a reading & conversation with LaShonda Katrice Barnett. This event is free and open to the public. Wednesday, February 3rd, 12-2pm. Women Writers of Color Reading Room, Pratt Library, 3rd Floor. Kansas City native LaShonda Katrice Barnett grew up in Park Forest, Illinois. Editor of I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters On Their Craft (2007), and Off The Record: Conversations With African American and Brazilian Women Musicians (2015), and author of the story collection Callaloo (1999). Barnett is a graduate of the University of Missouri, Sarah Lawrence College, and the College of William and Mary, where she earned a B.A., M.A. in Women's History and the Ph.D. in American Studies, respectively. Her debut novel, Jam on the Vine, courses a woman's launch of a black newspaper in the Jim Crow Midwest.

[guernicamag]

“Being a novelist, you get to play God. You can make anything happen. But I do feel beholden to history. I love to do research.” LaShonda Katrice Barnett talks to Amy Gall about the legacy of slavery, queer love, and the nineteenth century’s coded language of desire in her work. Read more here.

[queerbookclub]

I just finished my last (!) term of grad school and finally have time to read for fun (and post more regularly...) again, and these two beautiful books came in at the library! Which do I read first?

[prairielights]

LASHONDA KATRICE BARNETT

April 8, 2015 - 7:00pm Prairie Lights

Lashonda Katrice Barnett will read from her new novel, Jam on the Vine.

[therumpus]

Fast forward many years and I’m in graduate school at the College of William and Mary working on a PhD in American Studies. I noticed that all of the really great black history books received their source material from the black press. I’m a person who pays attention to footnotes. I love footnotes. I thought to myself, someday somebody ought to write a book about the black press. That would be a great story to tell. That’s kind of how the book started for me, as a valentine to the black press. I’ve been carrying this idea for a very long time. I identify as a lesbian and I knew that my main character would probably be a lesbian. I was very happy when she finally showed up and confirmed that for me. I get very upset about how American culture depicts gay and lesbian people. I think one of the ways that a society gets away with maligning queer people is to erase us from history. I thought it was a wonderful opportunity to have this lesbian heroine set in a historical narrative. If queer people ever have their praises sung in a historical context, it’s always related to theater or Hollywood or the world of fashion, but you never hear the stories about queer people in politics or activism. It was a conscious decision that my queer heroine also journalist and a social activist.

The Rumpus Interview With LaShonda Katrice Barnett

[libraryjournal]

Barnett’s compelling and acclaimed debut novel, Jam on the Vine (12/15), shines a spotlight on the crucial role the black press played in the lives of African Americans after the Civil War.

Introducing LJ's new monthly series of interviews with first novelists. First at bat is LaShonda Katrice Barnett.

[minoritiesinpublishing]

Daniel Jose Older, LaShonda Katie Barnett, and their books at the Sundays @ reading today at Branded Saloon in Brooklyn, NY.

[blacklesbianbooks]

They were quiet for a spell—time enough for her to run cold water over the boiled potatoes and peel two or three before adding, “It’s like she the oak tree and you the ivy—just wrapped yourself all around her.” That’s when Ivoe reached across the table and laid a hand on her arm and said, “Momma, that’s exactly what it’s like.”

From Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

[guernicamag]

Hello Tumblr. We're back.

Our July 15th issue:

LaShonda Katrice Barnett talks queer love in literature, nineteenth-century dildos, and black journalism as black activism.

Carly Nairn travels from southern Africa to Vietnam in a story on the plight of the world's rhinos, and asks whether the domestication, and dehorning, of the animals is its own kind of conservation.

Paul Stephens considers the intersection between poetry and our current information overload.

We have interviews with author Helen MacDonald and foreign policy expert Sarah Chayes.

We have fiction by Annie Liontas and Andrew Milward, poetry by Joshua Bennett and Garous Abdolmalekian, and photography by Mónika Sziládi.

Enjoy! And don't forget to let us know what you think.

[thefinessegoddess]

Support queer black authors

Today I had the extreme absolute pleasure of meeting Lashonda Katrice Barnett, the author of the very newly released novel Jam On the Vine. I throughly enjoyed reading her novel and I very highly recommend it, it's a queer black historical fiction piece and it's absolutely amazing. LKB is a phenomenal woman and a phenomenal writer.

[queerbookclub]

Queer books out in February 2015. Know any others? [image description: the covers of ten books, listed below]

Jam on the Vine by LaShonda Katrice Barnett

Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity edited by Carter Sickels

Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages by Robert Mills

The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys

Lyudmila and Natasha: Russian Lives by Misha Friedman

The Autumn Balloon by Kenny Popora

Canto Hondo / Deep Song by Francisco X. Alarcón

Bordered Lives: Transgender Portraits from Mexico by Kike Arnal

A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Fair Abasiyanik

The Devastation by Melissa Buzzeo