Author Imani Perry Shares Her Top Five Recent Obsessions

Tap is as much a musical as it is a dance form through which Ayodele Casel has achieved a complexity of rhythm and movement. Though she was mentored by Gregory Hines, she spent part of her youth in Puerto Rico and carries with her traditional African American culture. She had an extraordinary career in the 1990s and early 2000s, and it’s nice to see her returning to the fore. She will tell her own story in an autobiographical show, produced by her wife, Torya Beard, at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard this season.

A “Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs” trip, organized and curated by Michelle Lanier and Johnica Rivers, allowed me to experience history in an alternative way. The trips are based on recorded experiences from Jacobs’s own 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It’s incredible to stand on the site where she escaped slavery. Though many thought she went north, she actually hid in her grandmother’s attic and bore a hole into the wall through which she watched her children grow up. We visited the cemetery where her grandmother was buried and the river where they brought enslaved people into that part of North Carolina. It was a beautiful way to honor Jacobs, while bringing history and literature to life.

John Rhoden was an incredibly wellregarded sculptor in some ways forgotten by art history. Curator Brittany Webb brought his work back into public view last year in the exhibition “Determined to Be” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I see Rhoden as a bridge between the fine art tradition of Black artists from Birmingham, and folk and yard-art traditions. I find his use of Javanese wood to make large-scale pieces endlessly inspiring—the combination of texture and color creates this visceral quality that makes the sculptures feel vital, active, and charged.

In the South Side of Chicago, on the former site of a reformatory, sits Sweet Water Foundation, an urban farm founded by Emmanuel Pratt that offers food, activities, and talks to the city’s largely poor and working-class Black community. Fellows from colleges and universities give talks there. The center is a return to traditional African American farming and collective culture for the descendants of those who resettled as part of the Great Migration. It responds to the challenges of the current moment through community-based work at the highest level.

Jazz vocalist Cecile McLorin Salvant has an amazing range and depth, but she is also always playing. She has this kind of archive in her voice through which she seems to channel older artists—one moment she’ll sound like Billie Holiday and the next, like Ella Fitzgerald—but she has a very distinctive quality of her own. She draws on different styles of music such as show tunes, FrancoCaribbean, and African music. Little ditties between her and her pianist make the music really joyful too. I listened to her song “Deep Dark Blue” as I penned my novel on the color.