Of the Diaspora, In the Spotlight

Vital-Lazare, a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, was on the phone with her dear friend Brian Dice, a member of the board of the nonprofit publisher McSweeney’s. They were laughing and talking about Black literature, a familiar back-and-forth that has become the soundtrack of a friendship forged years earlier in the Nevada desert. The two had originally met in April 2017 at the Believer magazine’s literary festival in Las Vegas, where they bonded over a shared concern for overlooked works of Black literature, books that were under-reviewed, out