Growing up in a poor section of Columbus, Ohio in the 1990s Donovan X. Ramsey came of age in the midst of the country’s most devastating drug epidemic, one he explores in his new book, “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era.” Through the stories of four people, the author recounts the rise and fall of the drug and how Black America survived its destructive legacy. Ramsey has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, and was a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles.
BOOKS: What are you reading?
RAMSEY: I’m reading a lot of poetry. Most recently “Girls That Never Die” by Safia Elhillo. She’s a Sudanese poet whose work I’ve been following for a long time. This book is about the experiences of young immigrants. In a very interesting way, I’m able to see myself in some of the poems because they are so universal.
BOOKS: How long have you been a poetry reader?
RAMSEY: I’m a longtime poetry reader. I admire the art of it so deeply. I turn a lot to the poet Cornelius Eady, who wrote “Brutal Imagination,” which is fundamental to my thinking about race. The book is written from the perspective of a phantom so to speak, from the idea of a scary Black person. The scenario he uses is the kidnapping case of Susan Smith, who drove her children into a river and then blamed their deaths on a Black man. He creatively explores the idea of how it would feel to be accused of this. It’s so creative and so smart and instructive in how people are raced.
BOOKS: How were you introduced to poetry?
RAMSEY: My mom is a big poetry buff and wrote poetry. Every now and then I’d come across little bits of poetry she’d written in her journals. I admired that and it was a window into the secret life of an adult and the secret thinking of a parent. I think that created my appetite for poetry.
BOOKS: Did your mother have a lot of books?
RAMSEY: I wouldn’t say our house was full of books but we had a bookshelf that fit into a corner of the room. I feel lucky that, despite the fact that I grew up pretty poor with a single mother, she still made that investment in the books and authors she thought were important.
BOOKS: What kind of books did she have?
RAMSEY: I grew up reading a lot of Black women writers because that is what she collected. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, and Terry McMillan. We also had things that my mom was just interested in, like Greek mythology. I read a lot of Greek myths. We had reference books, like a copy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which is about sexual reproduction. That is how she explained it to us. She’d say, “Let’s break open this book, and we’ll see what childbirth looks like.”
BOOKS: What do you read in addition to poetry?
RAMSEY: I don’t read a lot of narrative nonfiction, which is weird since that is what I write. I’m mostly a fiction and biography reader. What I love so much about biography is the idea that you can make sense of someone’s life. That is reassuring to me as a person just trying to get through life, that our lives can have meaning.
BOOKS: Do you have a favorite biography?
RAMSEY: Manning Marable’s “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, is so strong and adds so many layers to a person I thought that I knew because I’d read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” as a teenager. When you see a figure like that become even further complicated, that’s a really meaningful experience.
BOOKS: What’s the last biography you read?
RAMSEY: The politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s autobiography, “Adam By Adam.” I was curious about him because when I was living in Harlem you heard his name all the time. I knew he was a powerful figure but I didn’t know why. In his autobiography you get a sense of the congressman as this incredibly cocky guy. It was satisfying in that you never read an autobiography like that by a Black man from that generation. He saw himself throughout his life as a winner. That can be really gratifying to read.