Friday, May 15, 2026

The Variety of 21st-Century Black Middle Grade Fiction


By Jeremiah Carter 

Middle grade novels are an interesting subset of 21st-century Black fiction, representing a substantial and varied body within the dataset.

Type “middle grade” in the search bar for the Navigator, then select “Novel” for Reading Form and “21st century” for Period of Publication. The results are notably varied, including urban narratives, sports stories, science fiction, Black girlhood and boyhood narratives, friend-group adventures, magical realism, LGBTQ+ themes, nature-centered stories, and more. The results indicate that middle grade Black fiction encompasses a wide range of genres, themes, and reading experiences rather than functioning as a narrow literary category.

This pattern suggests that middle grade fiction serves as an important and diverse entry point into contemporary Black literary culture for younger readers. It also indicates that Black middle grade fiction provides space for exploring identity, friendship, imagination, family, and social life across multiple narrative forms and genres.

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Thursday, May 14, 2026

Comic Book Shop as Source of Materials for Writing Black Panther



In many respects, a single comic book shop stands out as the central source of the primary materials that became my book Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles.

I purchased all 50 issues of Coates’s run from the same place: Heroic Adventures. I have been a customer at the shop for about 15 years now. By the time Coates’s Black Panther was announced, I had already been stopping by Heroic Adventures every Wednesday, new comic book day, for years, and I immediately asked the staff to add the title to my pull list.

Like clockwork during Coates's run, I was there to pick up my copy of Black Panther. When variants appeared, I grabbed those as well. I first heard about one of my favorite alternative covers for Black Panther when visiting Heroic Adventures. I eventually went on to collect all the Black Panther variants, which remains amusing to me because I distinctly remember visiting the shop during the summer of 2012 and feeling baffled as customers scrambled to grab variants for The Walking Dead #100.

In December 2018, I began drafting a table of contents for what would eventually become Writing Black Panther. Initially, I planned to write more broadly about diversity in comic books. Over time, however, I decided to focus specifically on Coates and Black Panther while still engaging larger questions concerning representation, politics, readership, and the evolving culture of comics.

Over the years, Heroic Adventures became more than a comic shop for me and became part of the routine, conversations, and collecting culture that helped shape Writing Black Panther.

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A Notebook on Heroic Adventures


Here's a roundup of posts on Heroic Adventures, the comics shop in Edwardsville where I've purchased comic books for more than a decade now. 

2026

2019
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Sunday, May 10, 2026

Coverage of Colson Whitehead's Cool Machine



Here's overage of Colson Whitehead's novel, Cool Machine.

• May 8: The 24 Best Books of Summer 2026 - Marion Winik, Charley Burlock - Oprah Daily 
• May 4: Cool Machine - Kirkus Reviews
• March 25: Cool Machine -- Publishers Weekly 
• February 27: Ann Patchett recs Colson Whitehead - Parnassus Books - YouTube
• January 4: Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead | ARC Book Review - Brithney - YouTube

Lists 
• February 18: Our Most Anticipated Books of 2026 - Hannah Jocelyn - New Yorker
• January 27: 52 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2026 - Elena Nicolaou - Today
• January 23: The 22 Most Anticipated Books of 2026 - Adam Morgan - Esquire
• January 20: 24 New and Upcoming Historical Novels to Look Forward to in 2026 - Molly Odintz - CrimeReads 
• January 18: 6 Literary Fiction Novels Coming In 2026 That You Have To Give A Shot - Ambrose Tardive - ScreenRant
• January 15: The Top 25 Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2026 - Ella Ceron - Harper's Bazaar
• January 15: The 25 Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2026 - Ella Ceron - Aol
• January 9: The Best Historical Fiction of 2026 - G. G. Andrew - BookBub 
• January 7: Most Anticipated Mystery & Thriller Books of 2026 - Jamie Canaves - Book Riot
• January 7: The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026 - Miguel Salazar and Laura Thompson - New York Times
• January 6: Our Most Anticipated Books of 2026 - Editorial Staff - Chicago Review of Books
• January 6: Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026 - Literary Hub


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Thursday, May 7, 2026

Star Wars For Black People (short vid)

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s groundbreaking “Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” storyline from Marvel’s Black Panther comics expands Wakanda into a galaxy-spanning civilization and blends Afrofuturist aesthetics and liberation into one of the most ambitious Black Panther narratives ever created.

Written by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm
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Tuesday, May 5, 2026

The Expansive Range of Black Science Fiction


By Jeremiah Carter

Science fiction novels are another important subset of 21st-century Black fiction, highlighting a strong and expanding presence within the dataset.

Type “science fiction” in the search bar for the Navigator, then select “Novel” for Reading Form and “21st century” for Period of Publication. The results include works that extend beyond traditional novels, comic books, children’s books, and adaptations categorized under science fiction. This range indicates that the genre reaches readers across multiple formats and age groups.

This pattern suggests that science fiction operates as a multigenerational genre in 21st-century Black literary production. Its presence across forms points to an expanding audience and a flexibility that allows it to circulate among different kinds of readers.

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Intradisciplinary Exchange in English: Gates, Fishkin, and Jim

What happens when a prominent scholar of African American literary studies invites a leading scholar of American literary studies, specifically Mark Twain studies, to contribute to a biographical series about figures of African descent? That’s what occurred when Henry Louis Gates, Jr. invited Shelley Fisher Fishkin to contribute to Black Lives, a series designed to produce “brief, authoritative biographies of individuals of African descent who profoundly shaped history.”

Fishkin's Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025) takes us beyond familiar conversations about interdisciplinary work and raises the issue of intellectual boundaries and the dynamics of intradisciplinary exchange.

While it is accurate and necessary to state that African American literature is American literature, or that African American literary studies is American literary studies, it sometimes behooves us to think of those areas as overlapping yet distinct creative domains. Doing so makes it possible to examine their points of convergence in more precise and critically productive ways.

The Gates–Fishkin–Black Lives connection here is a compelling case of intradisciplinary exchange. Keep in mind that Gates and Fishkin have been teaching and publishing in their respective areas for well over four decades at this point. So Jim, published under the auspices of Black Lives, represents a convergence of long-standing scholarly trajectories as well as a deliberate crossing of subfields within English.

What this example ultimately invites us to consider is how we might more intentionally cultivate intradisciplinary exchange within English itself. We might ask what is gained, and what becomes newly visible, when scholars move across subfields with purpose and clarity. In that sense, Jim offers a testament to the power of productive crossings within a disciplines. 

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Monday, May 4, 2026

Listening to Writing Black Panther: A New Format, A New Experience

I’m truly honored and excited that Bloomsbury Publishing has produced an audiobook version of my book Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles. It’s still relatively uncommon for books by literary scholars to receive the audiobook treatment, which makes this release especially important.

You can purchase a discounted audio edition through Bloomsbury’s website, or find the audiobook on Audible.

Below is a brief excerpt from the audiobook, read by actor Greg Lockett.


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Selective Readers and Time Constraint

Students at Black Graduation, April 28, 2026

By Jeremiah Carter

Every Fall and Spring at SIUE’s Black Graduation, there is a table of books where graduates are invited to select a free title as a parting gift, before taking their seat after their names are called. The moment is brief but may reveal something about how readers make choices under pressure. It also creates a rare setting where selection happens publicly and in real time.

A group of selective readers often return to the table at the end of the ceremony, uncertain about the books they had initially chosen. Many of them had already stood out earlier as those who took longer to decide, in contrast to graduates who quickly selected a familiar name, such as Frederick Douglass, or bypassed the table altogether. Their return suggested that the first choice had not fully settled the question of what they wanted to read.

These readers lingered, at times frustrating event coordinators and slowing the line of graduates behind them, but their behavior was notable. With 175 graduates and a wide range of available titles, some repeated editions, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comic books by Black authors, the table offered more than enough choice. What distinguished this group was not indecision alone, but a visible effort to match themselves with a text that felt worth carrying forward.

Their selectiveness suggests a form of reading awareness that is often difficult to observe in more controlled settings like classrooms or surveys. Faced with abundance rather than assignment, these readers treated the act of choosing as consequential, even within a brief and public moment. Professors of African American literature are familiar with how selection shapes reading, considering debates over range and depth in syllabus design, but we often take this process for granted when considering students’ reading practices; paying closer attention to these moments may clarify how readers define value, relevance, and intellectual commitment.

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Bloomsbury, Amy Martin, Black Panther, and Me


In October 2024, Amy Martin, a literary acquisitions editor at Bloomsbury Academic, reached out to my brother Kenton and me to ask whether we were considering expanding our article, "How the “New York Times” Covers Black Writers" into a book. She encouraged us to submit a proposal if so.

As it turned out, Kenton and I had already been developing our ideas into a larger book project. We completed a proposal and submitted it. Right after submitted, I followed up with Amy, writing: “Not to overwhelm you with proposals, but I noticed your 'Black Literary and Cultural Expressions' series, and since I’m nearly finished with my manuscript on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s run on Black Panther, I decided to prepare a proposal. Let me know if it might fit within your series.”

Amy kindly reviewed the materials and invited me to share draft chapters. I sent what I had at the time, the introduction through chapter eight of a projected ten chapters.

The rest is history, and in this case, “history” means rounds of reader reviews, revisions, editorial feedback, production processes, and now an upcoming release on May 14.

Along the way, Amy shared some very good news. First, beyond the standard academic contract, she noted that the U.S. retail price would be set at a level that allows the book to be sold in bookstores, an uncommon circumstance for a work of literary scholarship. Second, she confirmed that the press would also produce an audiobook edition, another notable advantage for an academic title.

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Roundup of Blog Posts about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Black Panther


I was pleased when the folks at my publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, invited me to contribute a blog post, "From bestseller to superhero: The impact of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Marvel debut," connected to my upcoming book, Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles. Here's a roundup of posts I've produced on Coates and Black Panther since the September 22, 2015 announcement that he'd take on the comic book.


2026

2023

2019

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Sunday, May 3, 2026

Star Wars for Black People

On April 27 and 28, 2026, I organized an exhibit highlighting “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda.” The exhibit featured visual panels and curated selections based on my book Writing Black Panther, specifically the closing chapter entitled “Star Wars for Black People.” The storyline stands out for its epic scope, imaginative reach, and its rare commitment to placing a wide range of Black characters at the center of a sprawling science fiction universe.

The phrase “Star Wars for Black People” comes from Steven Thrasher, who used it to describe the scale and cultural significance of the Black Panther film. The phrase proves just as fitting for Coates’s comic book storyline, where Wakanda expands beyond Earth into a vast intergalactic empire.

Coates’s “The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda” unfolds as a story of political conflict, interstellar travel, revolutionary struggle, and large-scale world-building. It is one of the relatively few works in popular culture to imagine outer space populated by a large and varied cast of Black characters. This alone marks a significant departure from many mainstream science fiction traditions, where Black presence has often been limited or peripheral.


from Black Panther #1 (2018)

Visually and conceptually, the storyline draws on Afrofuturist aesthetics—the blending of Black history, culture, and speculative futures. The narrative incorporates references to Maroons, Maasai, Zulu, and Mackandal, connecting Wakanda’s intergalactic reach to histories of resistance and survival across the African diaspora. These references expand the meaning of Wakanda, linking it not only to a fictional nation but to a broader history of global Black movement, struggle, and continuity.

The scale of the storyline becomes especially clear in issues #24 and #25, which bring together an extraordinary range of Black superheroes, including T’Challa, Storm, Falcon, Misty Knight, Luke Cage, Zenzi, and Manifold. The result is something akin to a large-scale crossover event, an “Endgame for Black people,” where multiple figures converge within a shared narrative universe.

Star Wars for Black People was designed to invite viewers and readers to consider what it means to imagine Black life, history, and possibility on an epic, intergalactic scale. In doing so, it highlights how Coates’s work extends the boundaries of both superhero comics and Afrofuturist storytelling, offering a vision of Black presence that is expansive, interconnected, and undeniably central.

• "Star Wars for Black People" (podcast episode)

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Performing Clay: The Multiple Iterations of a Black Literary Figure

Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. as Lula and Clay in 1964; André Holland and Kate Mara as Clay and Lula in 2026

The documentation of Jim in various adaptations, noted in Shelley Fisher Fishkin's book, had me thinking about different performances of Clay from Amiri Baraka's The Dutchman (1964). Here's a roundup of appearances.

• 1964: Robert Hooks in stage performance Cherry Lane Theatre, New York
• 1967: Al Freeman Jr. in film production 
• 2000: Chris McKinney in stage production in Hartford Stage, Hartford, Connecticut 
• 2002: W. Ellington Felton in stage production at the Source Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.
• 2007: Dulé Hill in stage performance Cherry Lane Theatre, New York
• 2012: Deforrest Taylor in stage production at the ArtWorks Theater, Los Angeles, California 
• 2013: Cornelius Davidson in stage performance at the Yale Cabaret, New Haven, Connecticut 
• 2013:  in stage production at Definition Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 
• 2014: Sharif Atkins in 50th-anniversary stage production, National Black Theatre, Harlem, New York
• 2014: Marques Causey in stage production in The World’s Stage Theatre Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• 2015: Michael Alcide in stage production at New Federal Theatre, New York
• 2015: Marvin Duverne in stage production at American Repertory Theater, Cambridge Massachusetts
• 2016: Michael Pogue in stage production at American Blues Theater, Chicago, Illinois
• 2017: Frank Oakley III in stage production at the KC MeltingPot production, Kansas City, Missouri
• 2020: Dulé Hill in streaming production of Play PerView
• 2020: Timothy Ware in Zoom production of Seeing Place Theater, Jacksonville, North Carolina
• 2022: Adebowale Adebiyi in stage production at the American Stage, St. Petersburg, Florida
• 2022: Denzel Taylor in stage production at Sunstone Studios MKE, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 
• 2025: Preston Coleman in stage production at the University of Iowa
• 2025: Keith Surney in Trap Door Theatre, Chicago, Illinois 
• 2025: Phillip Brown in stage production at Passage Theatre, Trenton, New Jersey 
• 2026: André Holland in film production

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Canonical Fictional Figures in Circulation: The Yale University Press Black Lives Series



Yale University Press has launched a series, Black Lives, which the publisher describes as an effort "to tell the fullest range of stories about the individual women and men who most profoundly shaped African American, Afro Latin, and African history.” According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the advisors for the project, “In launching its Black Lives series of highly readable and definitive biographies, Yale University Press has boldly committed to seeding a massive cultural project aimed at telling the collective African American epic through the life stories of the individual historical figures who created it.”

The series’ about page also features a quotation from Kellie Carter Jackson: “We need more Black biographies," she wrote in a review of one of the books in the series, "Biography matters: It reveals the importance of individual experiences and contributions.”

Interestingly, the two books in the series that have most captured my attention so far focus on the biographies of fictive characters—Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025) by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Bigger: A Literary Life (2024) by Trudier Harris. (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for Harris’s book.)

Jim and Bigger stand out as two of the most well-known Black characters to emerge in American fiction. Although they initially appeared in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Native Son (1940), respectively, both figures have the distinction of reappearing time and again in stage and screen adaptations.

The successive renderings, and, more broadly, the many iterations, of Jim and Bigger across stage, screen, book covers, and translations are revealing and instructive. They chart the evolving interpretations of these characters and also the shifting cultural frameworks through which Black figures have been represented and contested. Harris’s and Fishkin’s books have me thinking more and more about the extended trajectories of these two figures beyond the novels where they first appeared, and they prompt me to consider other Black characters whose presence moves across multiple works and media.

To remix Kellie Carter Jackson: we need more biographies of African American fictional figures, more reception histories of characters who have appeared in one work and gone on to circulate across many others. Such biographies matter, revealing the importance of interpretation and adaptation, as well as the cultural work performed by characters as they move across time, space, and form.

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Performing Jim: Black Actors and the Afterlives of a Literary Figure


Jim, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stands as one of the most widely circulated and frequently encountered representations of an enslaved Black character in American literary culture. He predates, and in many ways anticipates, the prominence of characters such as Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God, Bigger Thomas from Native Son, and Sethe from Beloved, who were later created by Black authors and have become central to African American literary studies.

I’ve just started reading Shelley Fisher Fishkin's book Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade (2025), and I was especially drawn to the chapter, “Jim on Stage and Screen.” In it, Fishkin traces how several Black actors took on the role of Jim in stage and screen adaptations of Twain’s novel between 1920 and 2012.

• George Reed in silent film Huckleberry Finn (1920)
• Clarence Muse in film Huckleberry Finn (1931)
• Wayland Rudd in Russian film adaptation Tom Soier, merging Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn (1936)
• Rex Ingram in film Huckleberry Finn (1939)
• Archie Moore in film Huckleberry Finn (1960)
• Serge Nubret in German TV miniseries Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns Abenteuer (1968)
• Feliks Imokuede Russian film adaptation Huckleberry Finn (1973)
• Brock Peters in film The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1981)
• Meshach Taylor in stage production Huckleberry Finn (1985)
• Ron Richardson in musical Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1985)
• Samm-Art Williams in PBS Television series of Huckleberry Finn (1986)
• Courtney Vance in film adaptation of Huckleberry Finn (1993)
• Raphael Peacock, as YOUNG JIM, in stage adaptation Sounding the River (Huck Finn Revisited) (2001)
• Charles Dumas, as OLD JIM, in stage adaptation Sounding the River (Huck Finn Revisited) (2001)
• Jacky Ido in German film Die Abenteuer des Huck Finn (2012)

Fishkin provides useful insight into how each actor navigated the challenges of portraying Jim across shifting racial climates and audience expectations. She highlights how portrayals of Jim have moved between caricature and complexity.

For instance, Fishkin notes that Rex Ingram’s performance appeared the same year as Gone with the Wind. “Unlike the stereotypical Black characters in Gone with the Wind,” she wrote, “Rex Ingram’s Jim is a loving, self-assured husband, father, and friend and a resourceful, intelligent, enslaved man desperate to be free” (209). The contrast underscores how even within the same historical moment, Black representation could diverge dramatically depending on artistic choices and production contexts.

Given my own research on “sellouts,” I was especially intrigued by the response to Archie Moore’s casting in 1959. When news broke that the renowned boxer would play Jim, concerns emerged in the Black press. A Jet headline asked: “Will ‘Uncle Tom’ Role Hurt Archie Moore?” In response, Moore made clear to the film’s producer and director that “I didn’t want to play an ‘Uncle Tom’ role” (211). He even sought guidance on how to approach the role with dignity from his brother-in-law, the one and only Sidney Poitier.

Fishkin’s chapter on Jim and the actors who have played him is deeply engaging. The sketches of these figures and productions invite a broader consideration of how a single literary character becomes a site of ongoing negotiation across media, nations, and generations.

It also raises questions about what comes next. When James by Percival Everett is adapted for film, we will once again have an opportunity to examine an actor stepping into the role of Jim, this time from a work transposed from a Black author reimagining Twain. Fishkin’s book was already in production before James was released, which means the evolving story of Jim’s afterlives is still unfolding.

Overall, Fishkin’s chapter documents a lineage of performances and opens up a rich field for thinking about Black acting, literary adaptation, and the cultural weight carried by a single, enduring character.

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Friday, May 1, 2026

Blogging about Poetry in April 2026

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• April 5: Naming Black Poetry
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