Takoma Authors

A kind of hip hop Generation X John Ashbery, Malik Wilson's prose/poetry seeks to capture the nature and fill and feel of everyday life. Getting at the undulating rhythms that undergird caught speech, Malik's lines are a masterclass of distillation in a fevered world where we are over-blitzed with information, sounds, sensations. His art can be seen as a kind of ongoing process of rendering, editing down, the making of an essential statement. Taking to heart the English language's ability for clipped, moany, koany expressions, what results is a jazzy-still word-silent collage of outrage, introspection, perspective cuddling, and, most of all, the assertion of a kind of Adamic notating and archiving of things. 

Our leader, and the founder of Takoma, we are most proud of Malik for the ideas of ascent, community, and communion in his art practice. There's a way in which - 'he does it for us, because of us' - is true in a way that both restrains and sets free. The curtain falls just beyond us to those near us as well, casting a kind of shed evening light, something ghostly, strange, but also very familiar. 

The Tribute Years - 2018-2024 is Malik's 6th book, and his first since 2014. A kind of mid-career, mid-life summation, it is 'about' all the things Malik's work has always been about - "harmony, rhythm, the classics, the garage, the steppe". Vistas both far and near beckon, adapting to what the poet Mary-Sherman Willis has called Malik "near and far range, both normal and weird". Perhaps no better complement has been given to Malik than that of his mentor, the scholar and teacher Dr. Herman Beavers, who said to him after reading his second book, "I wasn't so sure, but when I read your book, I knew you had figured it out - I knew you were ok". 

That can be a kind of summing up of Malik's entire oeuvre, of the purpose and mission of his art - a record of how he stayed ok, stays ok. 

Rebekah Zepeda’s stipulated prose feels like an insult, except one you are proudly familiar with – one you want more of. Stinging, stanking, judging, assessing, decrying, describing, it takes her through the contours of a mid-urban city, its cycles and noise, it’s quiet heartbeat. It slams along through the judges of work, the pleasures of the body, sensations smoky and tingly, barrel chested and slimline. In all, there’s a sense of a secret that passes through the clouds, something wispy and dark and unknown and good, but terrible. That idea grasps the black mark you can feel in her work. “Some of the sh*t is just f**** up ain’t it, and there’s no way around that.” All in all, we tremble a bit at the blunt truths and she makes us feel skinnier, wiser. It all could have been so much worse, except for, because of.

There’s also something so of the moment in her work. We feel it, and you will feel it too, but one is far too close to the picture to really ever be able to backtrack, to capture a fair splice of what is happening, now. But with this knowledge, and accepting it in faith in a sense, we can draw out certain truths. 

Some stuff you’ll get knifed for ain’t the stuff you think. There’s a darkness that leads to a light. Her earthy Solomonic propagations draw us back to the scribe, scholar, great spirit – true weariness has to be borne, and it can skip a generation, it can come far too young. A dude can get thrown in the pit as it were, and that’s all there is to it. Rebekah’s shocking, blushing, painfully truthed tales tell the rest of us to give pause, to stay alert, to be watchful, thankful, digressive. Not everyone is going to come out singing, and the gut check of her work captures the spirit of books like Patti Smith’s Just Kids – when you really hear how it was / how it is, it dusts off your romantic notions of what you woulda done under similar circumstances. None of y’all, Rebekah says to us, none of ya’ll would have made it.   

Many know him as a former musician, poet, talent manager, and teacher. But we know him as a dear brother, friend, and inspiration to so many of us at Takoma. This is why, despite our closeness to him, it means so much that Rodney Wilson will publish his first book, Remembering Trouble, with Takoma in March 2026. 

A tender, acid-eyed memoir told in chapters of counseling sessions, Rodney’s story telescopes back to his wading through measures of darkness, and his subsequent efforts to pull himself out. In the process, we witness harrowing moments, dangerous choices, and finally, in the nick of time, the long sober step to stability. 

His account, in conjunction with Talk Ugly, presents a new kind of searing honestly that will hopefully become du jour when it comes to the way we tell stories. Picking from the best roots of African American culture, the hip hop era, and the panoply of popular culture, family dynamics, and general manliness that forms us, Rodney Wilson shows how our best choices can still be in front of us, our greatest works still to come. 

Remembering Trouble is part of our African American Lives series:

Editor, Malik Wilson

Editor-at-large, Emelie Rutherford