books
Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings
“Norris beautifully memorializes his father with a fascinating explication of the man and the city that shaped him. Whether through the lens of the Great Migration, Richard Wright and Native Son, the flamboyant nihilism of drill music, the inadequacy of Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq and the term itself, or the making of Barack Obama, Norris renders Chicago and its Black citizens with the depth and complexity they deserve. As informative as it is inventive, as poetic as it is profound, Chi Boy is an absolute must-read.” — Jerald Walker, author of National Book Award finalist How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
"… this is one of the most beautifully written books I’ve ever read….”— Eleanor J. Bader, The Indypendent
THE CONFESSION OF
COPELAND CANE
Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive. He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates—the highly-rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his East Oakland neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.
The winner of the Northern California Book Award, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and startlingly contemporary voice, one that exposes the true dangers of coming of age in America: miseducation, over-medication, radiation, and incarceration.
"These dispatches from Planet Oakland totally blew me away. Imagine Thomas Pynchon, Nathaniel West, and Ralph Ellison going into a bar where they decide to write a novel about the gentrification wars in the East Bay. Under the authorial nom de guerre of 'Keenan Norris,' they create a picaresque hero named Copeland Cane who battles cops, developers, and rich liberals before vanishing in the chaos of an inevitable small apocalypse. Fantastic."
—MIKE DAVIS, AUTHOR OF CITY OF QUARTZ
LUSTRE
Taking place in the desert city of San Suerte, this novella tells the story of the luckless Lustre Little, a boy haunted by his hometown and the sun god glowering above it; ex-convict Sharone Bonilla, who is haunted by his history; and Destiny Deveraux, an orphan, come of age, who is learning and teaching love and responsibility.
“This book settles in this Faulknerian way into its own Yoknapatawpha County. Lustre, Sharone, Destiny, Eddie, Pedro, all of these people live within the landscape of San Suerte.”
—LALEH KHADIVI,
AUTHOR OF A GOOD COUNTRY
"As a lifelong resident of the city Norris has fictionalized in this profound story of an Empire, a people and their placelessness, this reader finds himself full ‘like so much syrup risen and settled, thick-sweet and still…’ In San Suerte, the barbershop feels like church, and church, like revival. A masterful offering."
—ERIC DeVAUGHNN,
AUTHOR OF THE BEAUTY OF DRAGONS
BROTHER AND THE DANCER
Winner of the 2012 James D. Houston award, Keenan Norris's first novel is a beautiful, gritty, coming-of-age tale about two young African-Americans in the San Bernardino valley—a story of exceptional power, lyricism, and depth. Erycha and Touissant live only a few miles apart in the city of Highland, but their worlds are starkly separated by the lines of class, violence, and history. In alternating chapters that touch and intertwine only briefly, Brother and the Dancer follows their adolescence and young adulthood on two sides of the city, the luminous San Bernardino range casting its hot shade over their separate tales in an unflinching vision of black life in Southern California.
"Read Keenan Norris, an important new American writer. His Brother and the Dancer delivers everything we want from a first novel: a story we've never read before, a world we've never quite known, a vision we're unfamiliar with. And yet it gives us something more, too, and just as exciting: the prose of a mature artist, and an understanding of the human heart that would seem nearly impossible in a writer so young. I learned many things from this fine and daring book."
—ANDREW WINER,
AUTHOR OF THE MARRIAGE ARTIST
STREET LIT: REPRESENTING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE
Over the last few decades, the genre of urban fiction—or street lit—has become increasingly popular as more novels secure a place on bestseller lists that were once the domain of mainstream authors. In the 1970s, pioneers such as Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim, and Claude Brown paved the way for today's street fiction novelists, poets, and short story writers, including Sister Souljah and Kenji Jasper.
In Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape, Keenan Norris has assembled a varied collection of articles, essays and interviews that capture the spirit of urban fiction and nonfiction produced from the 1950s through the present day. Providing both critical analyses and personal insights, these works explore the street lit phenomenon to help readers understand how and why this once underground genre has become such a vital force in contemporary literature. Interviews with literary icons David Bradley and Gerald Early are balanced with critical discussions of works by Goines, Jasper, Souljah, and others.
With an introduction by Norris that explores the roots of street lit, this collection defines the genre for today's readers and provides valuable insights into a cultural force that is fast becoming as important to the American literary scene as hip-hop is to music. Featuring a foreword by bestselling novelist Omar Tyree (Flyy Girl) and comprised of works by scholars, established authors, and new voices, Street Lit will inspire any reader who wants to understand the significance of this sometimes controversial but unquestionably popular art form.
DISSERTATION
MARGINALIZED-LITERATURE-MARKET-LIFE:
BLACK WRITERS, A LITERATURE OF APPEAL, AND THE RISE OF STREET LIT
This dissertation examines the relationship of the American publishing industry to Black American writers, with special focus on the re-emergence of the street lit sub-genre. Understanding this much maligned sub-genre is necessary if we are to understand the evolution of African-American literature, especially into the current era. Literature is best understood as a combinative process, produced not only by writers but various mediating figures and processes besides, at the combined levels of content, commercial production and distribution, and social and literary context. Therefore, offered here is a critical intervention into what has until now largely been a moralistic and polarizing high art/low art argument by considering street lit within the vast flows of literature by and about Black Americans, writing about urban areas, the market forces at work within the publishing industry and the writer's place in the midst of it all.