“To distract myself from doing revisions on the novel, I wrote six or seven short stories,” Thompson-Spires says. She submitted that novel to an agent, who requested that she alter the ages of the characters-which she found difficult. student at the University of Illinois, though as a YA novel rather than as short stories. Thompson-Spires’s book began its life when she was an M.F.A. Thompson-Spires credits her scholar husband, Derrick Spires, with introducing her to McCune Smith’s work, which, she says, “narrates black life from the mundane to the obscure and spans the didactic to the macabre.” Writing under the pseudonym Communipaw, McCune Smith’s satirical sketches focused on New York’s black working class. He was an abolitionist and a public intellectual whom Douglass had appointed as his paper’s New York correspondent. The author, James McCune Smith, was a surgeon-the first black American to obtain a medical degree. The book’s title and format are based on a series of literary sketches titled “Heads of the Colored People, Done with a Whitewash Brush,” published between 18 in the weekly Frederick Douglass’ Paper, out of Rochester, N.Y. “That’s a thing I think a lot of us know well, but I haven’t read too many stories about those kinds of people.” “I wanted to represent black characters who are marginalized in the white world, but also even marginalized within blackness: people who are accused of sounding white because of the way they speak, people who are really nerdy-a different angle of black identity,” Thompson-Spires says.
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