Swing Low: Black Men Writing

American Visions, April-May, 1995 by T. Andreas Spelman

By Rebecca Carroll (Crown. 1995. $12)--This book--the counterpart to Carroll's I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers--features interviews with 16 black male writers with accompanying excerpts from their works. The interviews are as high-spirited and insightful as the authors, ranging from award-winning August Wilson, John Edgar Wideman and Charles Johnson to promising upstarts Trey Ellis and Greg Tate.

These men tell about their compulsion to write, as well as their fears in calling themselves writers. Most compelling are their individual tales, often political and personal, that forced them to create a language that conveys the pain of their reality as black men in a white-dominated society.