Walls

<p><i>Walls: Essays 1985-1990</i> Kenneth McClane's first book of autobiographical essays (originally published in 1991) is closely related to his second collection <i>Color</i> published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2009. Walls is a powerful and deeply moving meditation on relationships. It begins with an essay on the death of McClane's brother Paul which changed everything. Time my work everything found a new calculus. </p><p>His brother's life and death are present in some way in all the essays that follow A Death in the Family as McClane tells us about giving a poetry reading in a maximum-security prison; his experience of being one of the first two African American students to attend America's oldest private school; teaching creative writing; his sister Adrienne; a divestment protest at Cornell; and his encounters with James Baldwin. </p><p>McClane has written a new preface to this paperback edition of Walls in which he reminds us that we are inevitably interconnected: we are each other's witness.</p>