Poulson-Bryant is a founding editor of Vibe magazine and the author of Hung: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday, 2006) and the forthcoming novel The VIPs, due next year from Random House.
We asked for answers to the same questions he poses in his own interviews, in a feature he calls the SPB Q:
Hometown:
Rockville Centre, Long Island (New York)
Favorite book:
(Fiction) Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison; (nonfiction) The White Album by Joan Didion and Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin.
Favorite author:
See above: my Holy Triumverate
Favorite movie:
Depending on my mood: Tootsie (Dustin Hoffman playing Michael Dorsey playing Dorothy Michaels = brilliance); All About Eve (best American screenplay ever produced);The Godfather Part II (the film that taught me that pulp fiction could, in fact, also be great art).
Favorite music:
I’ve reached that autumnal stage of life where all my favorite music was released when I was 21—or younger! So: Stevie Wonder’s Songs In the Key of Life or R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction or The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead.
Academic high:
Returning to Brown 17 years after dropping out, to finish my BA, then being asked to stay and teach for a year.
Life high:
In the same week in 2006, seeing my book HUNG in the window of Barnes & Noble and then reading the great review it got in the New York Times Book Review.
You’re on a desert island and can only have 5 CDs/books/or DVDs shipped in to you. What are they?
- Stevie Wonder’s Original Musiquarium (greatest hits)
- Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t
- I Love Lucy DVD box-set
- Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall
- Stephen King’s The Stand
Your favorite quote:
(a tie):
“I think that I know something about the American masculinity which most men of my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been.” ~ James Baldwin, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy”
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” ~ Joan Didion, The White Album
Guilty pleasure:
I really don’t think that anything you call a pleasure should cause you guilt. But whenever I feel sad or stressed out or crazy, I watch Schoolhouse Rock videos and I unpack my adjectives.