Jess Mowry
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Jess Mowry
Jess Mowry (born March 27, 1960 near Starkville, Mississippi) is an American author of books and stories for children and young adults. He has written eighteen books and many short stories for and about black children and teens in a variety of genres, ranging from inner-city settings to the forests of Haiti. Many of the novels are set in Oakland, California (USA), and deal with contemporary themes such as crack cocaine, drug dealers, teenage sexuality, school dropouts, and coming-of-age. Early life Jess Mowry was born to an African-American father, and a Caucasian mother. When he was only a few months old, his mother abandoned him, though this may have been understandable since Mississippi law at that time forbade interracial marriage. His father took Jess to Oakland, California, where he supported himself and his son by working as a crane operator, truck driver, and scrap-metal salvager. Jess's father was a voracious reader who introduced his son to books at a very early age. ...
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PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award
The PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award is for U.S. multicultural writers, to "promote works of excellence by writers of all cultural and racial backgrounds and to educate both the public and the media as to the nature of multicultural work." It was founded by PEN Oakland in 1991 and named in honor of Josephine Miles. PEN Oakland was founded in 1989. The award was dubbed the "Blue Collar PEN Award" by ''The New York Times''. In 1997, Pen Oakland inaugurated its PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award to protest censorship practices within the U.S. Other awards are the PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award established in 2006; and the PEN Oakland/Adelle Foley Award established in 2016 and "given to a work, not fiction or poetry, that has done much to improve the relations between people in American society." Although PEN Oakland unsuccessfully attempted to become the USA's third PEN center, the attempt did succeed in opening the doors for PEN Oakland to ...
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Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a British publishing, publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year."About Penguin – company history"
, Penguin Books.
Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths Group (United Kingdom), Woolworths and other stores for Sixpence (British coin), sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science. Penguin Books is now an imprint (trade name), imprint of the ...
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Anchor Books
Vintage Books is a trade paperback publishing imprint of Penguin Random House originally established by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954. The company was purchased by Random House in April 1960, and a British division was set up in 1990. After Random House merged with Bantam Doubleday Dell, Doubleday's Anchor Books trade paperback line was added to the same division as Vintage. Following Random House's merger with Penguin, Vintage was transferred to Penguin UK. In addition to publishing classic and contemporary works in paperback under the Vintage brand, the imprint also oversees the sub-imprints Bodley Head, Jonathan Cape, Chatto and Windus, Harvill Secker, Hogarth Press, Square Peg, and Yellow Jersey. Vintage began publishing some titles in the mass-market paperback format in 2003. Notable authors * William Faulkner * Vladimir Nabokov * Cormac McCarthy * Albert Camus * Ralph Ellison * Dashiell Hammett * William Styron * Philip Roth * Toni Morrison * Dave Eggers * Robert Caro * Har ...
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Berkeley Fiction Review
''Berkeley Fiction Review'' is an American literary magazine founded in 1981 and based at the University of California, Berkeley. Stories that have appeared in the ''Berkeley Fiction Review'' have been reprinted in ''The Best American Short Stories'' and the Pushcart Prize anthology. The ''Berkeley Fiction Review'' sponsors an annual Sudden Fiction Contest. Notable contributors * Ellen Akins * Jacob Appel *Peter Bichsel *Charles Bukowski *Will Eno *Seamus Deane *Mark Dery * Jürgen Fauth *DeWitt Henry *Neil Jordan *Perri Klass * Jeanne M. Leiby * Karin Lin-Greenberg * B. K. Loren * Valerie Miner * John Montague *Jess Mowry *Álvaro Mutis *Joyce Carol Oates *Dmitri Prigov * Daniel Scott * Olga Sedakova *Hal Sirowitz *Elena Shvarts *Julia Vinograd *Gerald Vizenor *Nellie Wong Masthead *Managing Editors **Isabel Hinchliff **Liam Magee **Kasandra Tapia **Julianne Han *Editors **Julia Cheunkarndee **Danica Chen **Gillian Gee **Danielle Tran **Conrad Loyer **Fiona Green **Sof ...
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Kiddie Porn
Child pornography (also called CP, child sexual abuse material, CSAM, child porn, or kiddie porn) is pornography that unlawfully exploits children for sexual stimulation. It may be produced with the direct involvement or sexual assault of a child (also known as child sexual abuse images) or it may be simulated child pornography. Abuse of the child occurs during the sexual acts or lascivious exhibitions of genitals or pubic areas which are recorded in the production of child pornography. Child pornography may use a variety of mediums, including writings, magazines, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, video, and video games. Child pornography may be created for profit or other reasons. Laws regarding child pornography generally include sexual images involving prepubescents, pubescent, or post-pubescent minors and computer-generated images that appear to involve them. Most possessors of child pornography who are arrested are found to possess images of ...
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Haitian Vodou
Haitian Vodou is an African diasporic religion that developed in Haiti between the 16th and 19th centuries. It arose through a process of syncretism between several traditional religions of West and Central Africa and Roman Catholicism. There is no central authority in control of the religion and much diversity exists among practitioners, who are known as Vodouists, Vodouisants, or Serviteurs. Vodou revolves around spirits known as '' lwa.'' Typically deriving their names and attributes from traditional West and Central African divinities, they are equated with Roman Catholic saints. The lwa divide up into different groups, the ''nanchon'' ("nations"), most notably the Rada and the Petwo. Various myths and stories are told about these lwa, which are regarded as subservient to a transcendent creator deity, Bondye. This theology has been labelled both monotheistic and polytheistic. An initiatory tradition, Vodouists usually meet to venerate the lwa in an ''ounfò'' (temple), run ...
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Crack Epidemic
The crack epidemic was a surge of crack cocaine use in major cities across the United States throughout the entirety of the 1980s and the early 1990s. This resulted in a number of social consequences, such as increasing crime and violence in American inner city neighborhoods, a resulting backlash in the form of tough on crime policies, and a massive spike in incarceration rates. Crack cocaine The name "crack" first appeared in the ''New York Times'' on November 17, 1985. Within a year more than a thousand press stories had been released about the drug. In the early 1980s, the majority of cocaine being shipped to the United States was landing in Miami, and originated in Colombia, trafficked through the Bahamas and Dominican Republic."DEA History Book, 1876–1990" (drug usage & enforcement), US Department of Justice, 1991, USDoJ.gov webpageDoJ-DEA-History-1985-1990 Soon there was a huge glut of cocaine powder in these islands, which caused the price to drop by as much as 80 percen ...
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Child Soldiers
Children (defined by the Convention on the Rights of the Child as people under the age of 18) have been recruited for participation in military operations and campaigns throughout history and in many cultures. Children in the military, including state armed forces, non-state armed groups, and other military organizations, may be trained for combat, assigned to support roles such as porters or messengers, or used for tactical advantage as human shields or for political advantage in propaganda. Children are targeted for their susceptibility to influence, which renders them easier to recruit and control. While some are recruited by force, others choose to join up, often to escape poverty or because they expect military life to offer a rite of passage to maturity. Child soldiers who survive armed conflict frequently develop psychiatric illness, poor literacy and numeracy, and behavioral problems such as heightened aggression, which together lead to an increased risk of unemploym ...
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New Orleans
New Orleans ( , ,New Orleans
Merriam-Webster.
; french: La Nouvelle-Orléans , es, Nueva Orleans) is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city-parish located along the Mississippi River in the southeastern region of the U.S. state of Louisiana. With a population of 383,997 according to the 2020 U.S. census, it is the List of municipalities in Louisiana, most populous city in Louisiana and the twelfth-most populous city in the southeastern United States. Serving as a List of ports in the United States, major port, New Orleans is considered an economic and commercial hub for the broader Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast region of the United States. New Orleans is world-renowned for its Music of New Orleans, distinctive music, Louisiana Creole cuisine, Creole cuisine, New Orleans English, uniq ...
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Louisiana Voodoo
Louisiana Voodoo (french: Vaudou louisianais, es, Vudú de Luisiana), also known as New Orleans Voodoo, is an African diasporic religion which originated in Louisiana, now in the southern United States. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional religions of West Africa, the Roman Catholic form of Christianity, and Haitian Vodou. No central authority is in control of Louisiana Voodoo, which is organized through autonomous groups. Historical records reveal the names of various deities who were worshiped in Voodoo, prominent among them were Blanc Dani, the Grand Zombi, and Papa Lébat. These were venerated at altars, where sacrifices were made to them. Spirits of the dead also played a prominent role in historical Voodoo, with some contemporary practitioners regarding the religion as a form of ancestor worship. Historical accounts suggest that in the 19th century, the saints played a prominent role, although amid the 20th-century revival, the veneration ...
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Miloš Forman
Jan Tomáš "Miloš" Forman (; ; 18 February 1932 – 13 April 2018) was a Czech and American film director, screenwriter, actor, and professor who rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the United States in 1968. Forman was an important figure in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Film scholars and Czechoslovak authorities saw his 1967 film ''The Firemen's Ball'' as a biting satire on Eastern European Communism. The film was initially shown in theatres in his home country in the more reformist atmosphere of the Prague Spring. However, it was later banned by the Communist government after the invasion by the Warsaw Pact countries in 1968. Forman was subsequently forced to leave Czechoslovakia for the United States, where he continued making films, gaining wider critical and financial success. In 1975, he directed '' One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' (1975) starring Jack Nicholson as a patient in a mental institution. The film received widespread acclaim and was th ...
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