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National Book Foundation > Author > Jerald Walker
Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult and Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, winner of the 2011 PEN New England/L.L. Winship Award for Nonfiction. More about this author >
For the black community, Jerald Walker asserts in How to Make a Slave, “anger is often a prelude to a joke, as there is broad understanding that the triumph over this destructive emotion lay in finding its punchline.” It is on the knife’s edge between fury and farce that the essays in this exquisite collection balance. More about this book >
Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult and Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, winner of the 2011 PEN New England/L.L. Winship Award for Nonfiction. He has published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Mother Jones, The Iowa Review, and Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including five times in Best American Essays. The recipient of the University of Texas at Austin’s James A. Michener fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Walker is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College.