Charlie Smith

Men in Miami Hotels, Smith tells the story of Cot Sims, a listing Miami gangster who returns to Key West aiming to--among other things--save his fool-proof mother from homelessness after a recent hurricane. For love, for cash, and for the hell of it, he snatches a trove of emeralds that his boss, the relentlessly vicious Albertson, keeps hidden on a small island. And then trouble, which has been coiling around him for years like a snake, bites.

A sweeping, eerily resonant epic of race and violence in the Jim Crow South: a lyrical and emotionally devastating masterpiece from Charlie Smith. Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother flees their home in the Red Row section of Chattanooga, accused of killing a white man. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved, the promise of transcendence in the written...

It is a practiced belief that it takes a community to raise the youth of that community. But what happens to the youth of that community if the people of the community and the very soil the community is built on are corrupted? Vietnam G. Franklin, also known as Li'l One Gone, was conceived through a mixture of heated passion laced with a dose of intoxicants. Born into a community rampant with crime and violence, a place where the consumption of illegal...

"Delvin Walker is just a boy when his mother flees their home in the Red Row section of Chattanooga, accused of killing a white man. Taken in by Cornelius Oliver, proprietor of the town's leading Negro funeral home, he discovers the art of caring for the aggrieved, the promise of transcendence in the written word, and a rare peace in a hostile world. Yet tragedy visits them near daily, and after a series of devastating events--a lynching, a church...

"A dazzling volume that gushes with the rhythms of life and language, from award-winning poet Charlie Smith. Moving through shades of darkness and light, Charlie Smith captures a refracted view of a disturbed, disintegrating world. Demo explores landscapes both natural and urban, probing the spaces where the two overlap. Its narrator is at once wanderer and witness, living among streets where flowers are covered with dust, and smells of Mexican food...