Chyanne’s review of Harlem Mosaics > Likes and Comments

Thanks for the review! Taylor’s book is useful, although it did come out several years after “Harlem Mosaics,” and has very different interests. What I was really interested in with HM, as a Black writer, was tapping into the creative energy of these ancestors and seeing if I could weave my way into the aesthetics of these wildly different but united (and clashing) personalities who were really consciously trying to establish a Black American literary tradition. So I try to blend their various styles together and at the same time develop something uniquely my own that comes out of the Black literary tradition, and in the process try to say something about how I see their creative process as a Black writer looking back a century later.