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Listen to a conversation about race, class and geography with Keenan Norris and Crystal Sykes. Winner of the 2012 James D. Houston Award, Keenan Norris’s first novel is a beautiful, gritty, coming-of-age tale about two young African Americans in the San Bernardino Valley—a story of exceptional power, lyricism, and depth. Erycha and Touissant live only a few miles apart in the city of Highland, but their worlds are starkly separated by the lines of class, violence, and history. In alternating chapters that touch and intertwine only briefly, Brother and the Dancer follows their adolescence and young adulthood on two sides of the city, the luminous San Bernardino range casting its hot shade over their separate tales in an unflinching vision of black life in Southern California. Keenan Norris teaches English and African-American Literature and helps conduct the Affirm program at Evergreen Valley College. His work has appeared in the Santa Monica, Green Mountains and Evansville Reviews, Connotation Press, Inlandi