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by Keenan Norris (Author)
Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive...
He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland's life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates-the highly-rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.
Recruited by the nearby private school even as he and his folks face eviction, Copeland is doing his damnedest to do right by himself, for himself. And yet the forces at play entrap him in a reality that chews up his past and obscures his future. Copeland's wry awareness of the absurd keeps life passable, as do his friends and their surprising array of survival skills. And yet in the aftermath of a protest rally against police violence, everything changes, and Copeland finds himself caught in the flood of history.
Set in East Oakland, California in a very near future, The Confession of Copeland Cane introduces us to a prescient and startlingly contemporary voice, one that exposes the true dangers of coming of age in America: miseducation, over-medication, radiation, and incarceration.
Author Biography
Keenan Norris is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. His latest novel is The Confession of Copeland Cane. Keenan was a 2017 Marin Headlands Artist-in-Residence and has garnered a Public Voices fellowship (2020), a Callaloo fellowship (2016) and two Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellowships (2017, 2015). He serves as a guest editor for the Oxford African-American Studies Center. He is the editor of the seminal Street Lit literary criticism anthology. Keenan's short work has appeared in numerous forums, including the Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, LitHub, Alta, Remezcla, popmatters.com and several anthologies of California literature. He teaches at San Jose State University.
