Black talk, blue thoughts

As a budding "black journalista," UCLA alumna Erin Aubry Kaplan couldn't believe her luck when the Los Angeles Times asked her to cover South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. "I saw the battle lines drawn not so much between positive and negative portrayals of black folks but between complete and incomplete," the Inglewood native recalls. The approach paid off, eventually landing her a columnist slot at the city's largest alternative newspaper, the LA Weekly, during the golden age of long-form journalism. From 1997 to 2005, Kaplan delighted readers with her intensely personal takes on post-civil rights America. "Unlike hair and skin, the butt is stubborn, immutable — it can't be hot-combed or straightened or bleached into submission," she wrote. "It does not assimilate; it never took a slave name." With Kaplan's brand of journalism as threatened by the Internet as the telephone book, she now writes fiction. But her singular voice sings again in a new collection of highlights from her reporting career.