Adapted from The Girl in the Yellow Poncho (Duke University Press, August 2023) It was late afternoon, long after the three o’clock dismissal bell had rung in my journalism classroom. But I wouldn’t be going home any time soon. I was co-editor of The Sheik Press and we were on…

Adapted from The Girl in the Yellow Poncho We were at the food truck at Bancroft Junior High, where kids smoked cigarettes between classes. Steven Adler, who played drums, was flirting with my cousin Lisa, 13, who was a year older than me. Steven was asking if she was going to the beach that weekend, but she wasn’t…

Hint: It’s not where you might expect — “Black. Ivory. Shadow.” I repeat the words to make sure I heard them right. “Black. Ivory… Shadow?” “Yeah.” Jasmin Baker, 25, is cracking up. “When I was younger I made it my thing.” She lowers her voice, making it seductive. “Like… yeah. I’m black ivory shadow.” “Right.” Now her boyfriend…

Radical changes in U.S. demographics are reinventing what it means to be multiracial — “Raise your hand if you would see me on the street and think I’m Black?” Several hands went up in an auditorium full of college students. “Okay. What about biracial?” More hands. “Hmm… And what if I wore my hair in an Afro?” Still more hands flew into the air. …

A Denver, CO mom offers multiracial teens a sense of community via their phones When her oldest child, Hans, was born in 2017, Lynn VanderWielen, who is Dutch American, initially described him to strangers as “half Dutch, a quarter Russian, and a quarter Nigerian.” But that didn’t quite feel right…

Trust me, I speak from experience — Adapted from The Girl in the Yellow Poncho “Dreaming is a state of psychosis. You know that right?” the late J. Allan Hobson, the ever-contentious professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School told me this years ago when I interviewed him for a magazine article. Widely credited as the father…

My most personal book ever is about to be published. Qué emoción! as we say here in Miami. Hello Friends! Welcome to a new series of posts about my forthcoming book, The Girl in the Yellow Poncho, a family memoir. Over the next few months, you’ll be hearing a lot…

Gone are X-Acto knives and fax machines but not our truth-telling mission — Journalism is an ever-changing, volatile profession right about now. Nothing is as it was when I started out some 30 years ago. To start, there was more money in the flush early 1990s. More time, too. Time for leisurely Manhattan lunches with editors; time to toss ideas back and forth…

An interview with the author of ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen: The Emotional Lives of Black Women’ — We all know about the myth of the super-powered Black superwoman. It’s been ingrained in our consciousness for generations. But is it healthy? Inger Burnett-Zeigler, a clinical psychologist and associate professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, says the strong Black woman mask we wear is an…