Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther: Podcast and Video Series
Here's a roundup of podcast episodes related to Ta-Nehisi Coates and his run on Black Panther.
Audio
Video
Related:
Writing Black Panther (Trailer 1)
Monday, April 20, 2026
Fewer Passing Novels, Younger Subjects
By Elizabeth Cali
From 2000-2024: just four. The dataset does not include any novels on the subject published in the first decade of the century, one novel in the 2010s, and three novels in the 2020s (to date). With such a small dataset it, was easy to start investigating cross-references with these four novels and other tags organizing the dataset. I immediately moved to see what other genres and categories might connect these four novels.
Three of the four mixed-race/passing novels published in the 21st century and included in the Navigator dataset take youth as some aspect of their focus. Two of the three are coming-of-age novels: Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones and Britt Bennet’s The Vanishing Half. Two of the same set of three are categorized as YA, or Young Adult fiction: Elyse Bryant’s Happily Ever After and Daven McQueen’s The Invincible Summer of Juniper Jones.
It’s interesting to consider that perhaps the most well-known and most frequently taught novel on passing, Nella Larson’s Passing (1929), focuses on adult Black women navigating their identities as mixed-race, light skinned women who could pass, and addresses adult audiences. Yet, three of the four novels we have tracked as mixed-race/passing novels in contemporary African American literature focus on a young adult audience and/or the experiences of identity formation in the movement from childhood into adulthood.
Related:
Following the Prolific Path of Walter Mosley
 |
| Selection of novels by Walter Mosley |
Walter Mosley appears more than any other novelist in our dataset for the Literary Navigator Device, suggesting that high productivity and genre specialization are closely linked to consistent output over time.
Type “Walter Mosley” in the search bar for the Navigator, click “Novel” for Reading Form and “21st century” for Period of Publication, and the first 29 results will be attributed to fiction by Mosley. Only five authors in our dataset of 21st-century novels have published more than 10 novels: Mosley, Alex Wheatle (13), Percival Everett (13), Eric Jerome Dickey (12), and Tracy Clark (11).
Notably, more than twice as many novels by Mosley as the next closest high-output author appear in the dataset. Mosley primarily publishes detective novels, and his prolific output suggests that genre fiction can facilitate a steady rate of publication.
Mosley’s presence in the dataset highlights how certain genres support long-term productivity. More broadly, the Navigator highlights how a small number of highly prolific writers account for a significant share of novels within 21st-century Black fiction.
Related:
Tracking Crime, Mystery, and Detective Fiction in the 21st Century
By Elizabeth Cali
I am working to get more granular in understanding the shifts in publication numbers of specific genres of novels in the 21st century. For this search, I began with searching for the number of novels categorized (even partially) as crime/detective/mystery novels in the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s. I wondered if there has been a particularly popular decade for publications in this area.
I thought perhaps we might see a spike in publications given the rise in interest in crime (albeit of the true variety) podcasts and television shows. The publication numbers of crime/detective/mystery novels are fairly consistent across the first three decades of the 21st century.
From our dataset, the number of novels published in the crime/mystery/detective category hover around 50 in the 2000s and in the 2010s, 49 and 52, respectively. To date they sit at 41 in the 2020s. The data suggest a consistency to both industry and creative commitment to these genres in contemporary Black publications that prompts an early insight and a question.
The insight: these numbers suggest this area of genre fiction is somewhat settled and stable in terms of their presence in contemporary Black literary output in the 21st century. The question: How settled are the author contributors to this area of genre fiction in terms of established authors versus newcomers to the scene each decade?
Related:
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles
A brief take on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s entry into comics, examining how his rise to prominence with Black Panther highlights the double-edged nature of representation—simultaneously expanding visibility while reinforcing disparities in attention for other Black creators.
Written by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm
Related:
Written by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm
Related:
The Case for Coates as a Comic Book Writer
A brief take on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s move into Marvel Comics, highlighting how his Black Panther run bridges African American literary continuums and comic storytelling while expanding the scope of Black artistic production across forms.
Written by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm
Related:
Written by Howard Rambsy II
Read by Kassandra Timm
Related:
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)