Böcker av Keenan Norris

An impassioned argument for the essential role of the community college system in a more just and equitable vision of American higher education Over forty percent of all undergraduate students in the United States attend community colleges, including a majority of Black and Latinx students. What do we know of their experiences, or the role this vibrant yet quiet wavelength of the American experiment plays both in the lives of these students and in shaping the landscape of American higher education writ large? Essayist, novelist, and scholar Keenan Norris has spent his career teaching creative writing at community colleges across the country. In a work blending policy analysis, cultural criticism, and personal narrative, The Two-Million-Person Experiment examines the perennial dearth of resources, precarious labor conditions, and complex challenges of teaching students left behind by an increasingly stratified economy. With a keen eye and morally resonant voice, Norris argues for a radical refashioning of American higher education through greater attention to community colleges, including specific alterations to their curricula and institutional structure. For readers of Mike Rose and Paul Tough, The Two-Million-Person Experiment offers an eye-opening tour of a little-known but vital part of higher ed--and a bold argument that community colleges hold the hidden key to an educational system that serves all students.

¿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.¿ ¿BuzzFeedOne of Publishers Weekly's Best Novels of the Summer ¿ One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of June ¿ One of ALTA's Recommended Reads for June ¿ One of BuzzFeed's Amazing Small Press Books To Add To Your Summer Reading ListCopeland 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 neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. And yet the forces at play entrap him in a reality that chews up his past and obscures his future. Copeland¿s wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable, as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills. And yet in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Copeland finds himself caught in the flood of history. Set in East Oakland, California in a very near future, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and contemporary voice, one whose take on coming of age in America becomes a startling reflection of our present moment.

In Chi Boy, Keenan Norris melds memoir, cultural criticism, and literary biography to indelibly depict Chicago-from the Great Migration to the present day-as both a cradle of black intellect, art, and politics and a distillation of America's deepest tragedies. With the life and work of Richard Wright as his throughline, Norris braids the story of his family and particularly of his father, Butch Norris, with those of other black men-Wright, Barack Obama, Ralph Ellison, Frank Marshall Davis-who have called Chicago home. Along the way he examines the rise of black street organizations and the murders of Yummy Sandifer and Hadiya Pendleton to examine the city's status in the cultural imaginary as "Chi-Raq," a war zone within the nation itself. In Norris's telling, the specter of violence over black life is inescapable: in the South that Wright and Butch Norris escaped, in the North where it finds new forms, and worldwide where American militarism abroad echoes brutalities at home. Yet, in the family story at the center of this unforgettable book, Norris also presents an enduring vision of hope and love.

¿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.¿ ¿BuzzFeedOne of Publishers Weekly's Best Novels of the Summer ¿ One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of June ¿ One of ALTA's Recommended Reads for June ¿ One of BuzzFeed's Amazing Small Press Books To Add To Your Summer Reading ListCopeland 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 neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. And yet the forces at play entrap him in a reality that chews up his past and obscures his future. Copeland¿s wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable, as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills. And yet in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Copeland finds himself caught in the flood of history. Set in East Oakland, California in a very near future, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and contemporary voice, one whose take on coming of age in America becomes a startling reflection of our present moment.