Blacklandia Presents Keenan Norris in conversation with Eric DeVaughnn

On Sunday, February 6, from 1:30-2:30 PM, Inlandia’s Blacklandia Events Series will present  author and educator Eric DeVaughnn and novelist, essayist, and short story writer Keenan Norris as they discuss Norris’s latest novel, The Confession of Copeland Cane. This online event is free, but registration is required: https://tinyurl.com/CopelandCane. All are welcome.

Norris is a fitting subject for this site's first week, as his website contains a page on "Writing freedom," on which he says, "The methods that people use to speak freely are as numerous and beautiful as our minds, from Walker's guerilla publication methods to the circulation of romance writings amongst the women in Kano."

Publisher’s Weekly named The Confession of Copeland Cane one of the best books of the summer: “Norris has created a voice that cannot be ignored.”

BuzzFeed calls The Confession of Copeland Cane a “significant new voice in fiction. Norris has written what may be one of the defining novels of the era at the intersection between Black Lives Matter and COVID-19.”

In the novel, Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive. He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates.

Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. Yet the myriad forces at play entrap him, and while Copeland’s wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable (as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills), when he is caught in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes.

Set in East Oakland, California in a very near future, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and contemporary voice, one whose take on coming of age in America is a profound reflection of our present moment.

This event takes place five days after Redlands City Council unanimously approved a five-year lease agreement with Lenslock Inc. for body worn cameras in the amount of $478,065 presented by Police Chief Catren. The budget for the cameras had been secured previously.

While many police-reform advocates called for body worn cameras in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, which kicked off summer 2020 Black Lives Matters protests, a 2019 review of 70 studies found body cameras “have not had statistically significant or consistent effects on most measures of officer and citizen behavior or citizens’ views of police.”