Meeting Eldridge Cleaver

I just received word my short nonfiction piece, A Black Panther’s Hearse, has been accepted for publication in Canada. Editors at Existere, A Journal of Arts and Literature, tell me it should be out the first week in October.

The story is about Eldridge Cleaver, Minister of Information for the Black Panther Party, whom I met during a visit to Berkeley, California in the spring of 1988.

I read Cleaver’s shocking book, Soul on Ice, in 1969, and if someone had told me I would someday meet the author, break bread with him, talk about his prison days and discuss writing with him, I would have told them they were crazy. And if they had told me he would offer to edit my stories, I would have told them they were stark raving crazy.

But that is what happened.