Lester Sloan began his photography career as a cameraman for the CBS
affiliate in Detroit, then worked as a staff photographer in Los Angeles
for Newsweek magazine for twenty-five years. His daughter, noted
essayist and National Magazine Award-winning writer Aisha Sabatini
Sloan, writes about race and current events, often coupled with analysis
of art, film, and pop culture. In this father-daughter collaboration,
Lester opened his archive of street photography, portraits, and news
photos, and Aisha interviewed him, creating rich, probing,
dialogue-based captions for more than one hundred photographs. Lester's
images encompass celebrity portraits, key news events like Pope John
Paul's visit to Mexico, Black cultural life in Europe, and, with
astonishing emotion, the everyday lives of Black folk in Los Angeles and
Detroit.
About Of the Diaspora:
McSweeney's Of the Diaspora is a series of previously published works in
Black literature whose themes, settings, characterizations, and
conflicts evoke an experience, language, imagery and power born of the
Middle Passage and the particular aesthetic which connects
African-derived peoples to a shared artistic and ancestral past. Wesley
Brown's Tragic Magic, the first novel in the series, was originally
published in 1978 and championed by Toni Morrison during her tenure as
an editor at Random House. This Of the Diaspora edition features a new
introduction written by Brown for the series. Tragic Magic will be
followed by Paule Marshall's novel of a Harlem widow claiming new life.
Praisesong for the Widow was originally published in 1983 and was a
recipient of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award. The
series is edited by writer Erica Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative
writing and Marginalized Voices in literature at the College of Southern
Nevada. Published in collectible hardcover editions with original cover
art by Sunra Thompson, the first three works hail from Black American
voices defined by what Amiri Baraka described as strong feeling "getting
into new blues, from the old ones." Of the Diaspora-North America will
be followed by series from the diasporic communities of Europe, the
Caribbean and Brazil.
