Riot Inside Me: More Trials and Tremors

“Satire and journalism are alive and well in L.A., at least when Wanda Coleman is doing the biting and the reporting.”―Publishers Weekly

The Riot Inside Me once again finds the author at the crossroads where art and politics, the personal and the political, and L.A. and the larger world meet. The 26 pieces gathered here―a “hopscotch” of essays, memoirs, interviews, and reports―include a haunting memoir of her first husband, a moth drawn to the flames of the more extreme forms of ’60s radicalism, and Coleman’s now famous “bad” review of Maya Angelou’s “Song Flung Up to Heaven”―“the most controversial piece I’ve yet written” – and a caustically funny report on its fallout.

Of this nonfiction collection, the Los Angeles Times said: “Coleman is best known for her ‘warrior voice.’ But her voice too can weep elegiac, summoning memories of childhood’s neighborhoods – her South L.A.’s wild-frond palms, the smog-smear of pre-ecology consciousness. Her voice hits notes as desperate as Billie Holiday’s tours of sorrow’s more desolate stretches. But it can also land a wily punch line as solid as that of a stand-up comic.”