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McLarin Essay Collection Honored by Group Behind Massachusetts Book Awards

Kim McClarin headshot
Professor Kimberly McLarin

The Massachusetts Center for the Book (MCB) has selected Emerson College Professor Kimberly McLarin’s latest book, Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed (Ig Publishing; 2024) for Nonfiction Honors in this year’s Massachusetts Book Awards program.

“Every year, judges from the writing, academic, publishing, bookselling, and library communities come together to select the best of the best — books that haunt and inspire, books that motivate us to think, feel, and learn,” said MCB Executive Director Courtney Andree.

The book, subtitled “Notes from Periracial America,” is a collection of essays that “illuminate the pain and power of aging, Blackness, and feminism,” according to the publisher.   

“Given that you can’t throw a rock anywhere in Massachusetts without hitting a talented writer, it’s a pretty nice honor. I’m grateful,” McLarin said.

McLarin, also Interim Dean of Graduate & Professional Studies, writes that she coined the term, periracial, … “To capture the endless cycle of progress and backlash which has shaped my one small life here in America during the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. To counter the idea — now largely abandoned by innocently believed for most of my adult life by white Americans on both ends of the political spectrum — that America has ever been post-racial.”

Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill.. me follows McLarin’s essay collection, Womanish, published in 2019 and called “blisteringly honest, funny and vulnerable” by The New York Times. She is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, several essay collection/memoirs, and the bibliomemoir James Baldwin’s Another Country: Bookmarked. A former staff writer for the Associated Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times, McLarin’s work also has appeared in the New England Review, the Sewanee Review, The Sun Magazine, The Root, Slate, and The Washington Post.

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