Dana Huff

@danahuff.bsky.social

1473 Followers 353 Following

Nerd. Teach for social justice. Instructional Coach, English Dept. Co-Chair, writer, reader, book & education blogger. EdD from Northeastern. #BlackLivesMatter. She/Her. Blog at huffenglish.com. #ITeachEnglish #EduSky

Announcement that says "I'm Presenting" at the National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention taking place from November 20-23 in Denver. The conference theme is "Dream Boldly." In the background are colorful and stylized images of the Rocky Mountains under a spray of stars.
A meme with a woman wearing glasses and short blond hair and a bearded man in a blue-striped shirt. The text says "When your PhD is in: Education, Social Sciences, Honorary... Excuse me! It's Doctor!" next to the woman. Next to the man it says, "When your PhD is in: Astrophysics, Bio-Medical Engineering, Aplied [sic] Mathematics... Call me Bob."
Merriam Webster Dictionary entry for “pass.”
“BELOVED, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be.”
“But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.”
“He did not put his hat on right away. First he fingered it, deciding how his going would be, how to make it an exit not an escape. And it was very important not to leave without looking.”
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”
“So Stamp Paid did not tell him how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shavings now because there wasn’t any wood.”
Whatever unsettling questions are raised or evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely and ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all.
“Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.”
Image of Beyoncé wearing platinum braids. Ticketmaster confirmation for ticket purchase. The confirmation reads: "You got em. Let the anticipation begin."
“And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again. They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time. Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it; that another stroke of time would do it at last. Only when she was dead would they be safe.”
“They sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line; cane, rain and rocking chairs.”
Two loaves of French bread on a cooling rack.
“It’s a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom. What God have in mind, I wonder. I had me some whippings, but I don’t remember nothing like this.
“In the dark my name is Beloved.” Denver scooted a little closer. “What’s it like over there, where you were before? Can you tell me?” “Dark,” said Beloved. “I’m small in that place. I’m like this here.” She raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.
Like kneading bread in the half-light of the restaurant kitchen. Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past.
“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were. Sethe looked to her left and all three of them were gliding over the dust holding hands.”
“Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”
“Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.”
“Anything dead coming back to life hurts.”
“Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else.”
“I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”
“What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.”
“A man ain’t nothing but a man,” said Baby Suggs. “But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.”
124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.
A gray and white tabby cat sits in front of a Christmas tree on a hardwood floor.
Cover of Wuthering Heights by artist Ruben Toledo. The cover features a stylized, cartoonish image of Catherine Earnshaw wearing a green dress and red shawl. The moors and ghostly trees are in the background.
Cover of Sena Jeter Naslund's novel Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer. The cover features part of a wrecked ship on a beach. A woman in dark clothing looks on. The cover has a sepia wash.
Close up of chocolate babka in a loaf pan resting on a cooling rack.
Nikki Giovanni in a blue jacket, smiling and holding a pen. Dana Huff is standing next her and is also smiling.
Cover of Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow. The cover features a pair of hands grasping prison bars.
Cover of Salt Fat Acid Heat by Samin Nosrat. The cover is white with hand-drawn cooking items, such as oils, canned tomatoes, onions, garlic, jars, lemons and limes, peppers, wine, and more.
Cover of Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing. The cover is orange and features two women.
Cover of Eve L. Ewing’s poetry collection 1919: Poems. The cover features Eugene Williams, a teenager who was killed while swimming. His face is half-submerged in blue water. The background is blue.
Cover of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven. The cover features tents lit internally. The tents are clustered on green grass under a starry night sky.
Cover of the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. The cover features a red, black, and off-white background. The ghostly image of the character Beloved stands in the foreground.
Cover of Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible. The cover is orange with a large tree in front of a yellow sun.
Cover of Marlon James's novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. The cover is yellow with a green bird in the center.
A cover image of Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. The cover has a red background. A woman is in the lower right corner. She is reach in up toward a man in the upper left. The man is flying away.
Signed title page of Tommy Orange’s novel There There.
Three people standing in front of a projector slide that says “Afrofuturism and SpeculativeFiction as a Practice of Hope and Joy.”
I'm presenting two sessions at NCTE: 1) Curiosity Killed the Cat: The Power of Not Knowing in the Humanities Classroom on 11/22/24 at 11:00 AM to 12:15 PM in room 205B and 2) Afrofuturism and Speculative Fiction as a Practice of Hope and Joy on 11/23/24 from 1:15 to 2:30 PM in room 259B.
What is the dumbest reason someone on the internet got mad at you?
Neon sign reading The Grill, Open 24 Hours, outside a restaurant.
Four smiling women standing in front of a projected slide with the title "The Past and the Future Merge to Meet Us Here": Connections Between Contemporary Popular Music and Literature.
Orange badge that says "I'm Presenting" at "Conexiones 2023 NCTE Annual Conventions November 16-19 Columbus, OH"