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Keenan Norris is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. His latest novel is The Confession of Copeland Cane. Keenan was a 2017 Marin Headlands Artist-in-Residence and has garnered a Public Voices fellowship (2020), a Callaloo fellowship (2016) and two Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellowships (2017, 2015). He serves as a guest editor for the Oxford African-American Studies Center. He is the editor of the seminal Street Lit literary criticism anthology. Keenan's short work has appeared in numerous forums, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, LitHub, Alta, Remezcla, popmatters.com and several anthologies of California literature. He teaches at San Jose State University.
These dispatches from Planet Oakland totally blew me away. Imagine Thomas Pynchon, Nathaniel West, and Ralph Ellison going into a bar where they decide to write a novel about the gentrification wars in the East Bay. Under the authorial nom de guerre of 'Keenan Norris,' they create a picaresque hero named Copeland Cane who battles cops, developers, and rich liberals before vanishing in the chaos of an inevitable small apocalypse. Fantastic. -Mike Davis, author of Old Gods, New Enigmas Keenan Norris's ear for language is simply genius. This book is praise song, love letter, and requiem for Black and Brown bodies caught up in California's post-pandemic, private-police ruled near future. A powerfully voiced, page-turning novel and required reading for anyone attempting to understand the struggle for racial justice. -Nayomi Munaweera, author of What Lies Between Us Keenan Norris has a fiercely prophetic voice. His enthralling portrait of Black life in a nearby dystopia forged by right-wing extremists and media elites will make you rage in recognition. A masterfully written coming-of-age story, The Confession of Copeland Cane is a must-read for grasping where the dog-whistle politics and hatemongering tactics of living public figures could lead us-and the collective fire it will take to forge a better future. -Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and the White Nationalist Agenda and Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir The Confession of Copeland Cane's potent cocktail of lyrical dexterity, societal critique, and fascinating characters brings to mind Ishmael Reed's classic Mumbo Jumbo. With this engaging novel, Keenan Norris announces himself as a voice for a generation living through an age of normalized absurdity. Norris's voice is necessary and vital-and a call to take heed. -Dr. Michael Datcher, Author of AMERICUS and Animating Black and Brown Liberation: A Theory of American Literatures To Read Confessions of Copeland Cane is to be enthralled by Keenan Norris' ability to seamlessly inhabit disparate voices while enveloping the reader in the brutality of a corrupt system driven by senseless racism. Norris possesses a singular talent. -Jervey Tervalon, author of All the Trouble You Need and Dead Above Ground Norris has created a voice that cannot be ignored. -Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Radical Reparations
Healing the Soul of a Nation
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