Monday Must Read! Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison
How desperately we need Ellison’s wisdom now.
Juneteenth is Ralph Ellison‘s second novel, published posthumously in 1999 as a 368-page condensation of over 2000 pages written by him over a period of forty years. It was originally written without any real organization, and Ellison’s longtime friend, biographer and critic John F. Callahan put the novel together, editing it in the way he thought Ellison would want it to be written.
“Ellison’s literary executor, John Callahan, has now quarried a smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. Gone are the epic proportions that Ellison so clearly envisioned. Instead, Juneteenth revolves around just two characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, race-baiting New England senator, and Alonzo “Daddy” Hickman, a black Baptist minister who turns out to have a paradoxical (and paternal) relationship to his opposite number. As the book opens, Sunraider is delivering a typically bigoted peroration on the Senate floor when he’s peppered by an assassin’s bullets. Mortally wounded, he summons the elderly Hickman to his bedside. There the two commence a journey into their shared past, which (unlike the rest of 1950s America) represents a true model of racial integration.”
Learn the History of Juneteenth Here
Jon Tribble‘s first collection of poems, Natural State, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2016. His second collection of poems, And There Is Many a Good Thing, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poems have appeared in print journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology, and online at The Account, Prime Number, and storySouth. He teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where, aside from being an excellent person and amazing literary citizen, he is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Review and the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by SIU Press.
Michael Meyerhofer is a contemporary poet and fantasy author who believes those two genres genuinely can get along. To illustrate this, his debut fantasy novel, Wytchfire (Book I in the Dragonkin Trilogy), was published by Red Adept Publishing, and went on to win the Whirling Prize and a Readers Choice nomination from Big Al’s Books and Pals. The sequels, Knightswrath and Kingsteel, are out now. He is also the author of the forthcoming Godsfall Trilogy.
The fabulous and loving Nancy Peacock is the author of the novels Life Without Water and Home Across the Road, as well as the memoir, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning, and Life. She currently teaches writing classes and workshops in and around Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she lives with her husband Ben. Her most recent novel, The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson is a definite must read! 
Robert Bausch is the author of multiple novels: On the Way Home; The Lives of Riley Chance; Almighty Me; A Hole in the Earth; The Gypsy Man; Out of Season; In the Fall They Come Back; Far as the Eye Can See; and most recently, The Legend of Jesse Smoke. In 1995, Bausch published a collection of short stories called The White Rooster and Other Stories.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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