Includes bibliographical references.

Part I. The foreigner's home. The dead of September 11 -- The foreigner's home -- Racism and fascism -- Home -- Wartalk -- The war on error -- A race in mind: the press in deed -- Moral inhabitants -- The price of wealth, the cost of care -- The habit of art -- The individual artist -- Arts advocacy -- Sarah Lawrence commencement address -- The slavebody and the blackbody -- Harlem on my mind: contesting memory: meditation on museums, culture, and integration -- Women, race, and memory -- Literature and public life -- The Nobel lecture in literature -- Cinderella's stepsisters -- The future of time: literature and diminished expectations -- Interlude black matter(s). Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Race matters -- Black matter(s) -- Unspeakable things unspoken: the Afro-American presence in American literature -- Academic whispers -- Gertrude Stein and the difference she makes -- Hard, true, and lasting -- Part II. God's language. James Baldwin eulogy -- The site of memory -- God's language -- Grendel and his mother -- The writer before the page -- The trouble with paradise -- On "Beloved" -- Chinua Achebe -- Introduction of Peter Sellars -- Tribute to Romare Bearden -- Faulkner and women -- The source of self-regard -- Rememory -- Memory, creation, and fiction -- Goodbye to all that: race, surrogacy, and farewell -- Invisible ink: reading the writing and writing the reading.