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Author’s Acknowledgments
I would like to offer thanks to everyone, named below and unnamed, who offered support during the writing of these stories. I wish special thanks to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for the fellowship that aided me in completing them.
Many thanks to all my students, colleagues and the staff members, too numerous to name, at Brown University, Northwestern University and Rutgers University-Newark, to whom I offer deep gratitude.
Particular thanks to the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Research Branch, and in particular to Messrs. David Smith and Jay Barksdale, supervisors of its invaluable Wertheim Study and related programs, for all of their endless generosity and helpfulness.
Thanks also to the various editors who published versions of these stories, and to the institutions where I had the opportunity to read versions of them.
Thanks also to all of my teachers over the years, especially E. L. Doctorow, in whose workshop I wrote one of the first of these stories.
Many thanks to Dorothy Wang, who introduced me to the sheet music that led to “Cold,” the story about Bob Cole.
Profound thanks to my fellow Dark Room Writers Collective members for their friendship, vision and superlative examples, and especially to Tisa Bryant, with whom I have shared these tales, and who suggested one, which she later published; and to the Cave Canem writers, for their friendship and stellar artmaking.
Many thanks to everyone at New Directions Publishing Corporation, especially Barbara Epler, and to my agent, Jonah Straus.
Also, an especial thanks to Jeffrey Renard Allen; Frances Bartkowski; Herman Beavers; Kevin Bell; Jennifer DeVere Brody; the late Rudolph P. Byrd; Alice Elliott Dark; Kwame Dawes; the late Gerard Fergerson; Reginald Gibbons; Thomas Glave; Rigoberto González; John Eric Hamel; Reginald Harris; Victor Hodge; Geoffrey Jacques; Tayari Jones; Mary Kinzie; Serena Lin; Keguro Macharia; Dwight McBride; Francisco Mejia; Askold Melnyczuk; David Barclay Moore; Nathanaël; Jayne Anne Phillips; Robert F. Reid-Pharr; Sarah Schulman; Christopher Stackhouse; Christina Strasburger; Ella Turenne; Jerry Weinstein; Jay and Lois Wright.
And above all, a million thanks and love always to Curtis Allen.