Founded in 2009, Lookout Books is the literary imprint of the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Run by UNCW's Department of Creative Writing, it issues just one or two titles a year, but those titles are choice. In 2012, one of them, "Binocular Vision," a collection of short stories by Edith Pearlman, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Single Color Mould
Lookout's latest book, "Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic," follows the mold and takes on a tough topic: How the COVID-19 pandemic affected the Black community.
In a word, starkly: African-Americans died of COVID-19 and related causes at a rate 2.7 times that of their white counterparts.
The pandemic, moreover, hit along with a wave of controversial killings of Black people.
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On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, an emergency medical technician, was shot and killed in her home during a late-night police raid. On March 20, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. A few weeks earlier, in February 2020, Ahmaud Arbery was killed by white vigilantes while jogging in a mostly white suburb near Brunswick, Georgia.
Those headlines, writes Valerie Boyd, who compiled contributions from 31 African-American essayists and poets for "Bigger Than Bravery," compounded the pandemic's cloud of paranoia and anxiety.
Boyd, a former arts editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the author of a scholarly biography of Zora Neale Hurston, did not get to see the book's release. Sadly, she died in February 2022, not of COVID but of pancreatic cancer.
Some of the contributors are famous, such as Alice Walker ("The Color Purple"), who contributed two poems. Many are not well-known but deserve to be.
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Everyone had a survival tactic: For many, like Destiny O. Birdsong, it was food. She spent much time in the kitchen refining her skills. Pre-pandemic, Jason Reynolds ate most of his meals in restaurants. As he details in "Char," he used his quarantine to re-discover his father's passion for grilling meat.
For others, music provided a balm. In "The Quarantine Album: Liner Notes," Deesha Philyaw builds a playlist of songs that carried her through. In "Joyride," Karen Good Marable sings songs with her preschool-aged daughter as she drives through the deserted streets of Atlanta.
Many derived strength from their elders, even as quarantines kept them from elderly parents' hospital bedsides. Boyd's own prologue is a tribute to her father, who ran a Texaco station in metro Atlanta. When the gas crisis cost him his franchise in the 1970s, he regrouped and built a successful tire and wrecker business. Roger Boyd died alone in 2020, of pneumonia; only a dozen close relatives attended his graveside service.
In "Hello, Goodnight," Kamille D. Whittaker comes to terms with a distant, alcoholic father dying in Jamaica, a brilliant musician dragged down by his demons.
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If the anthology has a weakness, it's that so many of its contributors come from academia. We get relatively few glimpses of "essential workers," like the single mother working double shifts as a grocery store delivery carrier and an Uber Eats driver, her infant daughter perched in a car seat. None of the pieces deal with nurses or people working lower-level hospital jobs.
For the most part, though, "Bigger Than Bravery" is, as its subtitle states, a tribute to black resilience. As Maya Angelou wrote, and still they rise.
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