 of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramanitish community. If you're online, check in the chat to find out what territory you're joining us from today. Also go to sftl.org to see how the library is celebrating First Person, our Native American heritage celebration. So before we get started with our conversation, which we are all very excited to talk about today, I also want to thank our partners at the Museum of the African Diaspora, MOAP, for helping us host this event and where you can also find a copy of Dr. Norse's book for purchase on their online bookstore. We also wanted to let you know about some upcoming events that we're sponsoring through the Center and at the library. Tomorrow, in person and online, in the corret downstairs, we're going to have Kimberly Cox Marshall, who is the daughter of Field Marshall Don Cox of the Black Panther Party, along with Steve Wasserman, Hay Day's publisher and executive director, to discuss the legacy of Don Cox and the Black Panther Party in the New Block Making Revolution. Cox was in charge of gun-running and planning armed attacks for the Panthers in San Francisco and in the Bay Area. So it's a very interesting book and should be also an interesting conversation. Wednesday, online, we are also going to be having Kevin Simmons, who we'll read from his new book, The Monster I Am Today, Leon Teem Price and A Life Inverse. He will be joined by poets Willetta Brinson, James Kavneek and Devorah Major. And that's online Wednesday, November 10th at 7 p.m. That's a program sponsored in partnership with the Hormel Center, our LGBTQIA Center, which is just across the way here on the third floor. And now to our main event. Described by Wendy Jean Fox of BuzzFeed Books as a significant new voice in fiction, Norris has written what may be one of the defining novels of the era at the intersection between Black Lives Matter and COVID-19. And by Michael Thatcher as a potent cocktail of lyrical dexterity, societal critique and fascinating characters, the confession of Copeland Cain brings to mind Ishmael Reed's classic Mumbo Jumbo. Norris's first novel, Brother and the Dancer, won the 2012 James D. Houston Award and he served as editor of the Critical Anthology street lit representing the urban landscape. He's been a fellow with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Kalaluw Writers Workshop and the Public Voices Program. His editorials and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Alta, Lit Hub, Electric Literature and Ramzellica, sorry, I probably mispronounced that. Norris teaches American Literature and Creative Writing at San Jose State University. He'll be interviewed today by Natalie Enright, the librarian for the African-American Center and without further ado, I'd like to welcome Dr. Keenan Norris and Natalie Enright. Yay. Thank you, Shauna. Thank you everyone for being here, to everyone online who's joining us, welcome as well and of course Dr. Norris, thank you for being here today. We're going to, well I'm really excited there. I'm really excited to jump into my questions but first I thought we would do a reading from the book if you don't mind. Thank you and I also want to thank everybody here. Okay, so I'm going to read first from the very start of the book. For those who have read the book or know something about it, you know that the book is a kind of correspondence, a kind of oral correspondence between two characters, Copeland Cain, the eponymous main character, protagonist of the story and Jacqueline, his friend, high school associate and journalism major one year ahead of him, he's not in college, she is, one year ahead of him in the educational tracks, so the book begins with Jacqueline. Don't worry about who I am, like Copeland would say, don't vex or do it on your own time and about yourself. Don't vex me, I have enough to worry about all by myself. I stayed up all night last night with my thoughts and on this sleepless morning, they are still with me. Maybe I should say yes, yes, I'll make this recording and risk my reputation and possibly my freedom in the process or maybe I should tell him to turn himself in, make sure to text it to him, put it in writing so that law enforcement doesn't go getting its black people confused, who am I? I could say more about myself, but it would only reveal my methods of misdirection. The real tell is what I decided to do with this dilemma that that boy has decided to drop into my voicemail like an orphan child onto my doorstep. If I put my student journalist suit on, there's no way I can say no to the wailing child, not when his story has all but knocked on my door and asked me to tell it, not when his story could make my career before I've even made it out of college and all I have to do is hit record. That's a question, not a statement. That's all I have to do. I have no idea what to do, let alone what comes next. Only the copes gotta talk to someone, gotta tell his story to someone to everyone. After all, law enforcement, V is so clear, has wasted no time telling theirs. Early reports indicate that the remaining fugitive is a male between ages 15 and 25. African-American athletic build has a history of criminal behavior as a juvenile. Investigators are reviewing his records. A second bulletin states that if he does not turn himself in before their next scheduled briefing in two days time, that they will bring charges. They might charge a single individual or multiple persons, maybe with one crime, maybe with multiple crimes. The public wants answers, so apparently everything is on the table. The timetable is even on the table. Charges might come sooner. One part of me doesn't wanna involve myself in this. Another tells me that I'm already involved, that there's no way not to be involved. Maybe being black means there is no means of escape. I'm always implicated. Even when I have no connection to the crime, even when it's only my heart that keeps me here thinking, questioning, fighting myself over freedom. That boy, he's out there phoning me like fear of arrest doesn't factor into his equation, like fear is foreign to him, which I know it's not. Maybe he knows something I don't and has figured out how to evade the police and the news, but I doubt it. As for me, I'm careful beyond careful not to state whether I'm contemplating my innocence in a studio apartment or a small condo or a town home or a student hostel. And my city shall remain undisclosed, thank you. I police myself better than the police ever could here. How about I play detective on myself and interrogate my own imagination? Where might I be? How about an unaccounted for New York City seller? Underground, literally. Like Hope's phone, I'm old school. I testify under a penalty of perjury that I am me and the far side is on the phonograph. I'm smoking the finest California cush, so good they might recriminalize it. Meanwhile, I've strung LED lights across the perimeter of the ceiling to illumine me to myself. That story makes more sense than the other one repeating itself in my thoughts. That story is the one where I tell Copeland to play it safe, turn himself in and prove his innocence in court. As soon as that story starts to take hold and make my mind up to call him back and tell him what to do, I hear laughter, loud, deep laughter. I'm laughing, but it's not my laugh, not my tenor at all that I'm hearing. It's something from the insides of the city instead, a boy laughing through the streets and my body so loudly that all I can hear is him and his laughing becomes crying and crying becomes testifying and he calls out through me to me. Ain't shit safe, girl. And that leads into Copeland's first section. I just wanna read the very start of this as well. They already arrested Keisha Free and DeMichael, snatched them up easy because so clearly done searched out their location. Then law enforcement did that criminal contact tracing thing, followed them from their phones and whatnot, tagged them up. Long as we're talking technology, boss, you might as well know my audio comes to you unencrypted in this bootleg old pre-sage voice app, the most off-brand, unheard of cell phone app you will ever encounter. It calls itself the Cayman Island apps. Don't ask me how I got this mess on my phone. It's all yours, truly gots to work with right now. So you might have to trust me on this one, even if you're not trying to trust this technology. Real talk, Jack. I only ask that the people hear me all the way out. Won't jeopardize y'all no kind of way, except maybe in y'all's feelings. I can't tell you about your heart, Jack. But I'm gonna tell you what's in minds. Nobody wanna hear why shit hit such a swerve and went so left, but the fact is it was all kind of facts done built up to the one big fact. Excuse me, edit that, the one pivotal incident that everybody and their mama care so much about. The crime in question, the weed that worked its way up from spoiled soil to choke the chief gardener. Now I'm giving testimony the only way I know how, without having Mr. Miranda's rights read to me. I'm making a real record right now. Not just how that man got got, but about everything that got me here. Copeland Cain, the alleged accomplice, the fugitive, the ghost, the rabbit, the radiated, remediated, medicated, incarcerated, the child who fell out of color at people time and into America, the whole deal, to go against the apex predator, they steady creating the end to on the news feed every five minutes. And fair warning, I tend to tell three stories to tell one and get sidetracked sometimes. But I'm gonna try and not do that shit. Thank you for that reading, I enjoyed it. In fact, the beginning of the book is probably, I mean, the whole book's my favorite, but that's my favorite part is that like first beginning part of the book. And something about this book that I noticed immediately when I started reading it is that it's so timely. There's COVID and the murder of George Floyd is very prominent in the book, which made me curious about your process. Can you talk about that? When did you start writing this book? Because it's like right now. Yeah, I mean, it's wild. Like this is the first in-person event I've done, like having a virtual book tour is really weird. This book came out in June, came out over the summer and so did all these events from like my dinner table. Yeah, I started writing this book in 2015. So quite a while ago. And I was spurred to it. I was inspired by the murders and armed black people back then, right? And going back long before that. I mean, my father grew up in the west side of Chicago and he had horror stories that he would tell me about the ways that police were treating black people going back to like the 1950s and 60s in Chicago. And so I've known about this my whole life. I think a lot of black kids grew up with this kind of like getting taught your ABCs, basically. But it was in 2015 that I began the book. I was also really, I remember I wrote the initial like 30 or 40 pages just under kind of initial rush of inspiration for those in the audience who are writers. You know how when you first just kind of get lit up to write something, you can jump into it and get pretty far. But then you need more to get past that. You need like structure and all that good stuff. And so something else that really helped me was that I was part of the 2016 Calaloo Writers Conference and went to Brown University to do this writers workshop with a number of great writers, including Nafisa Spires-Thompson, Hanif Abdul-Rakid was there, a number of other writers. Calaloo Writers Workshop is an African Diaspora Writers Workshop and so having the blessing of those writers getting that kind of go-ahead really inspired me as well. When you're thinking though about the presence of these very contemporary like 2020, 2021 life circumstances, the ghetto flu of the book which has obvious resonance with COVID. We're thinking about like the fires that haunt the book that haunt us here. Some of that was already in the book, long before 2020 because one environmental injustice, differential health impacts didn't start with COVID but were here long before that. So frankly it didn't take a lot of imagination to make that part of the story. And it was always like really crazy to me. I know you have a later question that kind of touches on this so I won't go too deep into it but it was always crazy to me like the kind of liberalism of the Bay Area contrasted with the kind of crazy, just depending on where you live in the city or in different parts of the Bay, the difference in your vulnerability or exposure to all kinds of environmental hazards that was just learning about the different parts of the Bay. I've lived here for about 20 years. I'm from Southern California but that really had impressed itself on me way before 2020. So in so many ways 2020 just reinforced and deepened and kind of put names to things that were already going on. And I really wanted long before 2020 to find a way to write dramatically about the undramatic processes of like the slow death of exposure to toxic superfund sites and all the other a dish of environmental injustice. And so that the fires obviously the masks were, we were wearing masks before 2020. You know, all of us here, if you're in the Bay Area in 2018, you're wearing masks already. So yeah, I wish I could say I had more imagination or I had like a crystal ball or something but I was just like walking around. And then I wanna ask you about location. The book takes place in deep East Oakland and Cope's neighborhood, the Rockwood, his apartment complex. They all felt like a character to me while I was reading this. But it's also, these are also places that even Cope himself talks about, they're not mentioned in the news. Even when big events, you know, there's a, at one point in the book, there's a fire of a barber shop. And he's like, it's not even in the news. So why set the book there? Why East Oakland and a place that maybe, you know, even people in the Bay Area, they know about or they've heard about it but they don't really know about it. You could have chose anywhere. So why there? And then also why in the near future and not exactly in this moment? Yeah, thank you, wonderful question. I want, as you said, right? East Oakland's a place that people, not just in the Bay, but I think around the country have heard of. A lot of that's probably because of rap music and whatnot, but for whatever reasons, right? It's one of these kind of, it's like one of the American, or it's understood as in the popular culture, one of the American ghettos that people just know about. But people haven't necessarily been there they don't know how like economically diverse, for example, East Oakland is, or the East Oakland's like half Oakland, right? So it's not just, you know, you kind of lower income community, right? So I wanted to, so I wanted to set it there because of that. I also, you know, there is this way that I remember, you know, back in 2006, 2007, there was a big crime wave and there were a lot of people getting shot and it wouldn't be in the news. You know, like you go to the barbershop and you hear about somebody got shot over here and like it wouldn't, you know, wasn't reported anywhere. And so that really struck me and really had resonance with the way that back in the day, before the civil rights movement, the murder of black people was not in like the mainstream newspapers did not report on it. You know, it was just, it was, you know, like publishing industry rule basically or newspaper industry rule that black newspapers reported on that and mainstream newspapers didn't. And so that struck me and then in terms of it setting not in the present but in the near future, you know, the pace and intensity of gentrification in here in San Francisco especially and then it's kind of like tidal wave that is swept into Oakland and into the East Bay. It's so intense in the last, say, 10 years and had such visible, you know, present impacts. I just wanted to like take a situation that was damn near close to what is, you know, exactly what is now where people can recognize, you know, all the, you know, like the street names, the, you know, the everything that's, you know, the slang, et cetera, et cetera. But say like, what if we move this a tick or two forward? You know, what is Oakland gonna be like in 10 years? You know, for those who are familiar with Oakland, like obviously like the near west side of Oakland, downtown, definitely the north side of Oakland are very gentrified, East Oakland, not so much, right? But how hard is it to imagine East Oakland, right? Getting hugely gentrified. Now I mean like, you know, in the 10s and the 20s, I mean like out to the 80s, 90s, right? Is that so hard to, you know, to imagine, you know, think about San Francisco, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago, right? So, I don't know, I was just sort of, you know, I'm like a writer, so I'm kind of a troublemaker. So I just like, let's, you know, let's do this. Let's see. I felt like, it felt like a scene from like a science fiction book when Copeland is on Treasure Island getting swallowed up by toxic soil. But in reality, it's not really fiction when you learn about places like Treasure Island and there's other places like that in the Bay Area and around the United States too. And so there's definitely this environmental injustice theme that I saw throughout the book, which was very interesting to me. And I found myself thinking about these places and how a place like Treasure Island, because everybody, you know, when it comes up in the book, everyone has like a really adverse reaction to it when they comment on it. But it's not inherently toxic, right? Like humans did that. That place became unwell because of human impact. And that made me also think about black and brown communities they're not inherently ghettos, but there's like this orchestrated neglect that happens to communities of color and to bodies of people of color too. And so yes, again, I was thinking about the environment and then black and brown bodies. So, and how their space has become unlivable. What is the connection between the environment and black and brown people in this book for you? Yeah, I mean, thinking about Treasure Island, thank you for the question. Thinking about Treasure Island specifically, I mean, so wild because it's true, as you said, that Treasure Island was not always this polluted place that specific human actions connected to war and nuclear experimentation and so forth, created its present state. It was also created or brought out of the water by human design, by human experiment, essentially. And so I think about the way that global capitalism, the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, unfortunately like it recreated us and why I say us. I mean, black Americans who are the descendants of the Africans who were forcibly brought over here created new kinds of people and hybridized cultures that had not previously existed and that were already, that kind of came into existence under enslaved but under threat and so forth. And so I think, so I think it's, when I think about like the sort of natural state of, of black and brown people in this country, I think about ways that the country itself in coming into being has already through colonization through slavery and then through all the kind of post-colonial and post-slave social structures has like sort of radically deformed everything from living situations, health, health and wellness, psychology, our psychology, so forth and so on. One way in which I've tried to speak to a kind of better state of being was through the use of time in the book. And so, you know, Cope says at the beginning of the book, you know, that he fell out of colored people timing into America, right? His child had fell out of colored people timing into America and you know, sort of the joke of CP time is that you're always late and like always late and all this stuff. And when he's, you know, like running for the bus at the start of the book, you know, he's always late and he's getting to school late. But, you know, he's in his body, right? And he's with his friends and it's later when he goes, you know, when he's incarcerated later that he gets, that he becomes punctual because he has to be on time for everything, right? For bed checks and for this and that. But he loses his rhythm, right? And so I wanted to show a way that, you know, sort of being on this one clock, you know, that is basically institutionalized. You know, all the ways that we've been institutionalized and deformed, right? Has thrown us off this other clock. Now I wanna talk about one of my other favorite characters, Cope's my favorite, but his dad. And his dad, when he's introduced to us, excuse me, he's introduced as an inventor, which I've found that interesting and I like paused for a second when I read that. I think because me personally, I was like, you know, I don't know any inventors, but the, but I do, like the more that you explained or Cope explains who his father is, I do. He's a hustler, he's a businessman. And, but his hustles, you know, I don't mean to, well, he's unemployed. On paper, he's unemployed and Cope describes it better than I can, but he's like, you know, he just basically has a social security number, he has his government name and a social security number. And so by societal standards, maybe that's like not impressive, you know? And by a hustler, I don't mean that his hustles are illegal, excuse me, he's creative. And they really are a form of resistance against a lot of the forces that are impacting him, his family and his community, which I found really interesting. And so that word inventor was so fitting. And again, these inventions are pushing back against things like some of the stuff we just talked about, the environmental injustice that he's experiencing, eviction, the lack of job opportunity in his community. Can you talk about Cope's dad as an inventor and then maybe even inventiveness and black people in general? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I really, you know, I really like Cope's dad too as a character. He's like a wild dude. He's like, I don't endorse many things that he says in this book, right? You'd like take on voices as a novelist, right? It's not just your voice, you'd take on these different voices, right? But he does have something like core to himself as a person that I really do like. And I like his journey, you know, what he explains toward the end of the book, you know, his whole journey and why he is this inventor. But yeah, I mean, there's a great irony to this idea of, you know, to black invention in part because like if you look at, like if you take, so like, if you look at like macroeconomic data around entrepreneurship in America, it'll all tell you that African-Americans are, you know, at the bottom of entrepreneur, you know, in terms of entrepreneurship, right? How many entrepreneurs there are and so forth. But it's not reflective of reality, right? And, you know, so from the, you know, kind of like the most basic kind of making, you know, lemonade out of lemons, you know, making a dollar out of 15 cents, all these like phrases. And then like all the ways that, you know, black folks know, you know, just in our histories that our forebears had to hustle to get up, right? You know, I know, you know, there's one millionaire in the history of my family and he was a millionaire a long time ago, like decades and decades ago. And I know how he, you know, how he got that money above board and below board, right? And, you know, and, you know, because there weren't formal, you know, there weren't formal avenues. It's interesting you use the word hustling. I know my dad, after he was expelled from Fresno State for protesting the war and some, you know, segregation issues in Fresno in 1970, you know, and he lost his track scholarship and so forth, he eventually was able to get reinstated to the school, but his track career was over. And he told me that his mother told him that she, you know, that he needed to drop out of school because he wasn't, you know, gonna be able to, you know, do tracking more. He wasn't gonna go to the Olympics and all this stuff. And he needed to start hustling and she didn't mean drug dealing or anything. She meant like get two or three jobs, like go work at the factory, go work in the fields to, you know, be a ghetto taxi man because the, you know, the taxis didn't go into the hood. Like his dad had done, you know, be a janitor at the bar at night, just like that was hustling, right? And so how's all that not inventive? How's all that not entrepreneurship, right? What's Uber? You know, like, it's like that my, my grandpa's Uber, you know, 60 years ago, 70 years ago, right? So there's a, so there's, there's a lot of irony there to this idea that, you know, black people aren't starting businesses and whatnot. Also want to say that, you know, Cope says very early on that, you know, how could he be anything but an inventor, you know, what with all the experiments we done had ran on us, right? And so there's this way too that American society, academia, not just America, but like Western society and academia has studied black people. You know, the whole domain of sociology in America is built off of this study of black people in the West and South sides of Chicago, you know, the University of Chicago, the School of Sociology from Robert E. Park in the early 20th century all the way on up, right? Is based on these white sociologists going into the black, into the black belt of Chicago and studying black people. That is, that methodology is replicated in a lot of different fields of study, the history of a lot of different domains of study in America, in American academia. So, you know, like, so, you know, it's just like this idea of like, who gets to run the experiments? Who gets to be the inventors, right? And who are the subjects of the inventions, right? And the study. I wanna talk a little bit more about Cope and his father. Cope loves his father. His father loves him. That comes through very clearly through the book and their relationship is very fascinating. And they're different in a lot of ways, but they're very similar too. You know, I see them both as hustlers. You know, Cope has his shoe hustle. And like, then we've talked about his dad being an inventor and they both care about their community and they both care about family. Talk to us about the process of writing and creating their relationship and maybe speak to where each of them came from in your imagination. Yeah, I mean, their relationship is really fraught. You know, I think oftentimes we're very much like our parents, but in ways that are like hard for us to understand until we start to walk in their shoes, quote unquote, until we're like, sort of, until we're able to recognize that we're having similar experiences and in some ways dealing with things in similar ways, as they did. And that creates some humility, first of all, right? And some respect and kind of longer view of ourselves and time and history and so forth. And so I think Cope's in process with that. He's a kid, right? He's a teenager in this book and about to exit his teenage years. So he's not really like fully at the point where he can really take in just what you said, that he's a lot like his father. Like he's just starting to understand that, right? But you're right that they have a lot of similarities. I mean, the main difference is just that Cope is like, he's sort of like just, he's a kid in 2030, right? Or the book takes place starting in 2030 and going back to 2020 and coming forward. So he's like a kid in this modern world. He's got like, there are ways that Cope isn't going to refer to people that are now properly understood as bigoted or as insensitive that where his father was brought up in a different world, right? With different constructs and norms and so forth. I mean, those are their main differences, but frankly at the deeper level of who they, not what they say and how they say it, but what they believe, what they value, right? Yeah, they're very similar, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, so I just wanted to kind of portray the intensity. And I think we oftentimes like, we feel that way about our parents, right? Or our grandparents, we're like, why are they talk like that? Why are they saying that, you know? You know, and, you know, I wish they, you know, which they wouldn't, don't have her talk right now or whatever, you know? And it's, you know, so it's like problematic, I think, is like the really nice term we use for it. And so Cope's kind of embarrassed by his father, you know? Some of y'all are embarrassed by, you know, you know, by your four bears too, right? You know, and I saw, I wanted to just portray that kind of angst and all that stuff going on. What was the second party question? Like, where did they come from in your back to you? Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, one, yeah, just kind of, you know, going through that same process myself, you know, as a young person and as an adult. And seeing it in other people too. Seeing other young men, you know, fall out with their fathers, reconcile with their fathers. So I saw, I've seen a lot of that in other people over the course of my life. So I think it comes from that. I'm also just like really kind of fascinated by these crazy black men. I'm like really interested in these people like LeVar Ball and, you know, whomever else. Although, you know, these guys are just like, who said we can't be entrepreneurs? You know, who said that, you know, just because I don't have a college degree, you know, or just because I don't talk right, you know, that I can't, you know, come and, you know, be in this mix, right? And the kind of reaction to that, like a lot of people being like, yeah, we said you couldn't be here, you know, right? Yeah, and so I think that I'm really interested in that. Gentrification is another big part of this book as well. And I really love the way Koch describes it. He says that, or he describes gentrification as aliens landing on East Oakland, which I thought was perfect. And his observations of gentrification, this force against his life, against his community were so real to me. And for anyone who hasn't experienced it, he shows us how insidious it can be and how violent it can feel and how slow and fast it happens all at the same time. And for me, while I was reading the book, this was most apparent when he's talking about the barbershops in his communities and how that changes over time. Talk to us about the importance of barbershops in his community and yeah, the importance of barbershops in his community and again, how their presence changes throughout the book. Okay, yeah, I mean he, yeah, Koch goes through some phases with his barbershops in the first part of the book. And it really, to me, like the first 50 pages or so of the book and my favorite part of the book, I wanna like briefly name check a book that some of y'all might not be familiar with, The Saul Bellows, The Adventures of Augie March. I really loved the first 50 pages of that book and I always wanted to write sort of a coming of age, beginning to a coming of age book that had something like that, kind of flavor and that kind of energy. And I don't know that I, I'm not trying to compare myself to Saul Bellow but I had just sort of the neighborhood stuff in the first part of that book is so cool. And so, yeah, I mean, in terms of the barbershops, I think you have this sort of just, I saw Trevor Noah earlier this week. It was like, yes, this daily show and it was something that they were asking black people about some issue or another. And Trevor Noah was just like, man, it must be so hard to be a black barber because not only do you have to cut people's hair but you have to answer all these questions from these reporters every time there's some issue, they come to the black barbershop and just be asking all these questions. So, I mean, you have this sort of like idea of the black barbershop as the hush harbor where black men are able to express themselves, be funny, to be emotional, they're like very cordoned spaces not just with black men but with men in general in America where it's publicly acceptable, socially acceptable to be emotional. And so, so you have that kind of thing but I also wanted to layer over it what's going on with the neighborhood. So you have like the nation of Islam Barbershop which just closes down at one point. And you have the, I mean he calls it the heathen barbershop. So the heathen barbershop. And I remember in the town I'm from we had just like right across the street we had like the Christian barbershop that guys would come up every day in like full suits and be playing gospel music and right across the street you had the heathen barbershop and everybody's always late and there's like smoking weed outside and you know it was just, and so I wanted to you know capture something about the community and its multiplicity, right? And, you know, because I think again like there are all these stereotypes about a place like East Oakland that it's just buck wild, you know all this gang violence and so forth and there are elevated levels of crime and violence and so forth but you also have institutions like you know that are of all kinds of different types that are reflective of the whole like journey of black people in this diaspora, right? Throughout American history and throughout the whole history of the Americas that are in every black neighborhood, right? If I could briefly say to a book, one book that really beautifully shows this is Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man. I really love that book too for its you know for its kind of panoramic view of the way that black diasporic culture is expressed in a black neighborhood in America. And staying on that topic of neighborhood and community coat in an effort to clean his community or support his community, he ends up getting accused for trying to destroy it by community members and not outsiders which I thought was really interesting. And so his relationship with his own community is complicated and it differs from how he's seen and his relationship with the community the private school community that he attends. What was the importance of or what is the importance of community in this book and then talk to us a little bit about Cobb's relationship with both of those communities? Yeah, that's a great question and one that I have not gotten yet. I mean, it makes me think of a lot of things. I mean, I think that like as individuals, you know, we're both who we are as individuals and we are also products of these different environments, right? So we are, I can define myself as Kenan Norris but also as like an African-American. I can define myself as an American. I can define myself as a writer and all these things, right? And so we both are like part of our communities and of our communities but also like in certain ways we are in contradiction, right? In our, as ourselves, we're in contradiction with our various communities, right? And this goes way beyond race, right? There are so many ways in which we are like misaligned with those, you know, those communities, those groups that we were either born into or even that we've taken up of our own volition, you know, at later points in our life, right? We're just like, like none of us just fit in, you know? None of us just fit in and Cobb doesn't just fit in, right? He's, you know, he's this kind of weird kid, you know? And so, yeah, there are all these ways like he sits up on his dumpsters and like observes Rockwood, right? Because I just, I like that kind of, you know, as a writer, you're many ways like you're the observer. You are both in it, you live in your community but you're also writing about it, right? Or you're living in the world but you're also writing about it, right? And so, you know, so I think that at base just sort of philosophically that's like the challenge. That's part of just the human challenge for everybody is how do you reconcile, right? That, so Cobb's just working through that within his own community in Rockwood, right? There are ways that he just doesn't fit in where he's not as street, where he's just weird, you know, whatever, you know? And, you know, yeah, like he has the father that he does. So he has certain, you know, certain kinds of, you know, ideas that other kids in the community don't have and that's what drives him to ultimately, you know, you know, getting in this situation that sends him into, you know, into juvie. And so the other kids are like, why would you do that? Right? But, you know, we all have stuff like that. You know, it doesn't matter who you are, right? We all have ways that we're sort of just an outsider to the groups that we're a part of. In terms of, you know, Pete Montay, his other community, I know, so, so inventively titled. You know, it's just, I don't know. I was having some fun with that. I mean, I think, you know, these private schools, they like, you know, they recruit black kids, you know, mostly to play sports, you know, it's like, one point, Dayless Out, like they had a like 200 game football winning streak, you know, you go out there, what do I say? Like, a lot of those wins came out of East Oakland, that's all I'm gonna say, right? So, you know, it is what it is. I mean, and so I wanted to kind of play with that, because Cope is not only recruited, you know, with the idea of playing sports, although that is sort of part of the idea with him, it's also that he'll be this voice, speaking to black issues and so forth. And I wanted to kind of dig into the complexity of that, of being, you know, a black writer, writing to a primarily non-black audience and about issues that are important, primarily but not exclusively to black people. And so I wanted to dig into the complexity of that. And because we're in the African-American Center and we have the black hair exhibit happening right now that's surrounding us, I wanna talk a little bit about hair in this book. There's a part in the book that Jack is describing and remembering seeing this photo of Cope when he's younger and he has cornrows and she describes it so affectionately and she says, what did she say exactly? She says, oh, he looks like a very young and very innocent Alan Iverson, which made me chuckle while I was reading that because, you know, anybody that was familiar with Alan Iverson while he was playing basketball, the media almost always criticized him for wearing cornrows and then there's also another part in the book earlier, a description of Copeland, or many descriptions of Copeland as he's going to the barber shops and people's impressions of his hair. And these were moments for me that, and someone else said this and I agree with them, that the book seemed so specific and universal. Those moments were very specific to Cope's experience but I think as black people, our hair is a point where we can connect with each other. It's a way that we can express ourselves creatively as individuals. It's also sometimes a point of trauma in our own personal stories. And so I'm curious, what were you thinking about when you were talking about Cope's hair? Because hair is like mentioned. Yeah, it comes up a lot. Yeah, it does. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I really wanna congratulate you on the hair exhibit here and for those who haven't checked it out, the hair exhibit at the African American Center here is wonderful. Thank you. I, yeah, I mean, I think as you so eloquently stated, black hair has a lot of connotations. It's like, it's very loaded, it's very loaded sort of topic. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that I did want to, you know, when Jack's talking about him and she references Alan Iverson, yeah, I mean, it's just like this way that, you know, Alan Iverson was seen in the general public versus the way that his expression of his personal style, right, was just seen totally differently by black folks, right? This is, you know, like now like black people and, you know, black men are a lot freer with our hair than we were 20 years ago when Alan Iverson was rocking his cornrows and, you know, when he took the rose out and just had the big ol' afro and everything and playing ball with that. Everybody's hair was, or not everybody, but vast majority, right? It just, yeah, yeah, close, close fade. And so it, I am, you know, so I just wanted to kind of, you know, give a moment to that, you know, and to the way she would see, you know, see him and see, you know, why she would make that reference. Yeah, I mean, as far as the book and hair, I don't know, I mean, it is just sort of those barber shops and his hair is just like it's a touchstone, you know, throughout the book. Also, when he goes to jail, right, he, you know, they cut his hair. And if you read Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death, you know, which is a, it's a comparative study of systems of slavery throughout world history, not just black people being enslaved, but people, you know, people all over the world have been enslaved, obviously. Right, one of the patterns that Patterson sees, right, is that they so often take people's hair, right, that that's one, you know, because you have control of your hair, right, your hair is, you know, you're one of the ways you can express yourself, right, your individuality. And so to take somebody's hair, right, to cut it off and not allow them to do anything with it, is a very powerful gesture, right, is a way of taking your identity. And so I also wanted to, you know, so like you have all the early stuff in the book that's, you know, around hair that's kind of wild and, you know, a lot of it is a little silly. And then you have this like very violent taking away, right, with that. And I think Cope actually, he says something about that too. He says, anywhere they take, anywhere they took your rights, they took your hair too. Yeah, yeah, I like that. He's, he knows, he knows about it too. Yeah, he knows about it, he knows about it. And speaking of that, Cope, his voice is one of the many things I dig about him as a character and I liked in this book. There's like an inconsistency with his language and maybe some of that's because of the two worlds that he lives in with the private school and his own neighborhood. So he does, he like code switches and he does it, so I felt like so effortlessly and sometimes even really politically. Can you talk about the importance of having a character in a book switch back from standard English to the language of his youth and his neighborhood and yeah, the significance of putting that and writing in a book? Yeah, I mean, I think we're taught again, I think there are probably some writers in the audience and we're taught as writers that like voice in a book has to be consistent, right? But that doesn't really make sense. And because we're not consistent in the way we speak, I'm not talking right now the way I talk to you if we were just talking one-on-one, right? Context matters, not just text, right? And so there was a talk, I saw the linguist John McWhorter who is mostly known as like this black conservative or whatever, like he's a very learned person where he's talking about code switching and he said, you know, code switching is only criticized with black Americans for some reason. You know, he goes through, I don't have the conversions with all these different cultures to speak to it in the way that he does. It's in his Google talk, though. He says that, you know, people all over the world, right, are code switching constantly, you know, first of all, from like work to home, but crossing borders, different dialects within a language in different regions and so forth, that people are constantly making these switches, right? And so Cope's just doing that, right? I hear black Americans doing this all the time, right? I mean, you're the same black people who use like double negatives and say can't instead of can't, you're right, and all this little stuff that probably a lot of people don't even hear, right? But we do. Also speaking, you know, like proper English, you know? Like they're not, you know, they're not like mutually exclusive one another. And so, yeah, like Cope's read, you know, he's read books, he's, you know, he's acquainted enough with formal English to speak it, you know, or to write it, but it's not how he just talk if he, you know, if he's just like, let him loose, you know? So I just thought it was more realistic, honestly, to like write the book like that. I like that. Well, I have like 500 more questions, but we don't have that much time. I did want to give a chance to open it up to the audience here and also online if there are any questions from people. I don't know, Anisa, do we have questions online? Just some really nice comments. Yay. I did that. Did anybody have questions for Kimmer? So it seems like it's really made, like you've been able to meld parts of your life together, like being a literature professor, and writing this book because I've never heard anybody reference, Saul Bellow. For a book that's being published now, people know who he is. Sure. But it doesn't, a lot of people don't make that connection as well as the reference I think of if I heard it right, too, in visiting them. So do you feel like people who read a lot of books have more hope in terms of building our society that you're up against are bad for the next 10 years? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I think that it's a great question and Ellison and Bellow, of course, were great literary friends, right? And so, you know, they were inspiring each other, but yeah, I mean, I think what reading books does is, you know, it's a more extended contemplation of somebody else's mind, their imagination, their story, than pretty much anything else. Like it's very intimate, and, you know, because of the- I think the reader brings something. Right, it's interactive, yeah. The reader learns something in the language of books, but that you can't really learn from a Wikipedia page. Oh, absolutely. That's what you can get a lot of information about. I won't say this. I mean, I think that one thing that I believe would, you know, make all of us better as individuals and make our society better by extension would be to know more about each other, right? And I think that, again, you know, the kind of vocation of reading does, you know, at its base it's about sitting with somebody else's mind, you know, for a long period of time, not for like the space of a song or a movie, but for a long time. And so I think the more we, you know, the more that we like kind of set that for ourselves as a discipline, you know, and a source of pleasure and entertainment at the same time, like I think the more we will know about each other. Thank you for your question. I also wanted to say in general, thank you for everybody who's here. Like I didn't expect like people to come to this. So, you know, it's cool. Yes, thank you everyone for coming. Do we don't have... I have another, I have an online question. Oh, okay. And maybe you can repeat it for the microphone. I'd love to know what other pieces of literature and nonfiction influence Kenan Norris's writing that influences your writing and those works that you absolutely love. And I love you're throwing down the book recommendations we love, you know, we love that. Okay, so let me try to rephrase that. They love the book list that you came throughout the talk and then they're interested in... What other literature influences you? What other literature influences you? And what you absolutely are loving right now. And what literature you're absolutely loving right now. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the question. Yeah, I mean, I'm, you know, I am, of course, like very influenced by Ralph Ellison. You know, as you said, it's right there in the book. William Faulkner, he's just kind of like going back. But more recently, like Barbara Everestow's Girl, Woman Others, an amazing book that's doing all kinds of really interesting stuff with language and with like narrative structure and with like just kind of jazz-like improvisation. Of course, like Toni Morrison. I really deeply love Sula, which is her second book. Like not one of her more famous books, but I really deeply love that book. I really love jazz. Those are my two favorite Toni Morrison books. Yeah, I mean, right now I'm reading Anthony Villazquez-Nassau's After Parties. Anthony Villazquez-Nassau, one of my roles at San Jose State is that I'm the coordinator of the Steinbeck Fellows Program. Program where we give fellowships to six writers every year to help them with their, you know, continuing their writing. Anthony, unfortunately, died last year during his fellowship, but he wrote this brilliant book that is really being acclaimed all over the place. And so I wasn't the program coordinator last year. So I'm just introducing myself to his work, Cambodian American writer, whose work is set in the Central Valley in California, Central Valley. Yeah, that's one of those tough questions just because it's like, you know, it's like you can never remember, you know. But, you know, just, I also write a lot of essays. Rebecca Solman, who's another Bay Area bass writer, really love her writing. Yeah, it could go on and on. Walter Mosley, many people. Thank you, thank you. Well, again, thank you everyone for being here online and actually in this physical space. This is really special. Thank you, Dr. Norris, for coming today and sharing the book with us and talking to us. I really appreciate your time. And, you know, I guess. Yeah, well, may I? Thank you. If I may real quickly, I just want to thank you for inviting me and for interviewing me and for really bringing all this together. And again, thank you for having me. What about the book? Oh, shot. Oh, yeah. It's on Amazon, you know, the publisher I named Press as well. You can go to their website, buy it. It is at Moab. It's at most of the bookstore around Bay Area. So, yeah, all those places. Cool. Is that part of the bookshed? Yeah. Yeah.