Victor LaValle is the author of a collection of stories, Slapboxing With Jesus, which won the PEN/Open Book Award, and three novels, including The Ecstatic, after which Mos Def named one of his albums, and Big Machine, which won an American Book Award. He is also one of the most...

This weekend, the fourth movie in the spectacularly successful Step Up franchise opens in theaters across America. In it, as in every other movie in the surprisingly compelling series, a group of dancers comes together to help solve a problem. In this case, the problem is that the wealthy developer...

Like Mitt Romney, I attended Cranbrook, the elite, Detroit-area private school. Unlike the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, I was not the rigidly straight son of a sitting Republican governor but a scholarship student, a political radical, and a burgeoning homosexual. But like John...