What excited you most about taking on the Book Reviews section for Callaloo?

Simply put, I want to sustain the work of Black folks. 

Teaching allows me to support students in naming the work as work, and honing their craft. Writing allows me to enact a citational politic through which others can continue to express their ideas. What excites me most about Book Review editing is finding another opportunity to continue the tradition of my people as culture workers, griots, and geniuses. 

How do you hope the Book Reviews section can contribute to Callaloo’s broader mission?

Callaloo thrives in staging a literary and cultural exchange throughout the diaspora. To me, this means we have to engage the diaspora through time and space, as well. I hope that this section continues to disrupt what we consider as canonical African American. Traditional book reviews are typically assigned to upcoming and recent work. Our section is exploring book reviews from past works, as well. I love the idea of having contemporary thinkers commune with writers and thinkers from the past to form a radical community of literary critique and culture work.

What do you hope readers gain from engaging with the Book Reviews section?

I hope the Book Reviews section stages a type of salon made unavailable to us by our digital era, and one where we can support folks in selecting their next read or give them the opportunity to return to a book with new questions brought forth by the reviewer themselves. On this last point, I hope they’ll also be able to appreciate the curation of the section itself to think about books as in conversation with each other, and the reviewers themselves are engaging in a meta-discourse about their own takeaways from the book.

Outside of literature, what influences your editorial sensibility?

Since it is spring time, I have recently been approaching editing through the lens of some of my favorite blooming flowers. For instance, peonies share a symbiotic relationship with ants, who rely their nectar for sustenance, but also aggressively protect them from arachnids. This in particular influences my approach in editing as I understand each writer as engaging in a blooming process.  In turn, my process is to protect the form of the book review, the writer’s craft, and also the book reviewed at hand without impeding on the inevitability of what I know will be great writing.

What advice would you give emerging critics or scholars interested in writing reviews for Callaloo?

Editors are ultimately readers. I do not need to know what you think is good or bad. In fact, whether or not we all “like” something is a superficial critique. If you review a book, it should have transformed you or something in you—help me understand where on the page that occurred for you, what the writer’s invitation to us is, and who I can be once I read it. 

MALI COLLINS, PhD is a doula and professor of African American Studies at American University. She is the author of Scrap Theory: Reproductive Injustice in the Black Feminist Imagination (Ohio State University Press, 2025). She lives in Baltimore, MD.