This message comes from Norton Young Readers of In Praise of Mystery from US Poet

Loria Aida Lamone and Caldecod honor-winning illustrator Peter Seis, a transcendent picture book featuring the poem that will travel into space aboard

NASA's Europa Clipper in praise of mystery, celebrates humankind's curiosity.

Asked us what it means to explore beyond our known world and shows

how the unknown can reflect us back to ourselves.

In praise of mystery is available wherever books are sold.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown. Years ago at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a fiction writer from East Harlem asked me,

where's your anger?

I said, excuse me.

He repeated himself, where is your anger? We were playing basketball, both there on scholarship. How can you easily

move about these people? He meant the predominantly white environment of a summer writers conference in Northern New England.

This was the late 90s.

I was startled, as it suddenly brought to mind all the suppressed rage I had,

old to racial slights and affronts.

My assumption is that any person of color who has a

send it in their field, say a law partner, cardiologist, tax attorney, or presidential candidate has had to weather their fair share of

micro-aggressions, if not outright racial harassment.

Mine included being told in graduate school that a presumed black speaker in my poem would

not use multisyllabic words, racial profiling in multiple department stores.

A student evaluation of all zeros with the word black turd written at the top. Clearly she was upset with her final grade. And of course, a

colleague who made a joking remark about a diversity hire. I never told my colleagues. These were nothing compared to the abuses

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