CANR
WORK TITLE: ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.carvellwallace.com
CITY: Oakland
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1974, in McKeesport, PA.
EDUCATION:Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, B.F.A. (theatre), 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, writer, media host, social worker, and educator. Case manager and program designer for incarcerated and fostered youths for fifteen years; became a freelance journalist; host of podcasts, including Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Slate, 2013; Closer Than They Appear, Al Jazeera, 2017; Finding Fred, iHeart Media, 2019; and Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America, Vox, 2020; University of California–Berkeley School of Journalism, lecturer in narrative, 2022; Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT, visiting writer, 2023.
AVOCATIONS:Cooking.
AWARDS:Radio Television Digital News Award, for episode of Closer Than They Appear; best podcast of 2019, Atlantic, for Finding Fred; American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Heising-Simons Foundation, 2023.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic, ESPN: The Magazine, Esquire, Glamour, Guardian, GQ, Medium, MTV News, New Yorker, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, Slate, Toast.
SIDELIGHTS
[open new]Carvell Wallace is a high-profile journalist and award-winning podcast host who has bestowed his sympathetic attentions on everyone from underprivileged youths to basketball superstars. He was born in 1974 in a blue-collar town in western Pennsylvania and raised by a hardworking single mother. By his teen years they were on the West Coast, where he attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. During his early career he spent a decade and a half supporting youths in detention facilities and foster homes through case management and programming. At length his creative impulse led him to earn a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Finding a niche as a freelance journalist, he would gradually contribute to a slew of esteemed publications, including the Atlantic and New York Times, and has written long-form profiles of such celebrities as Riz Ahemd, Mahershala Ali, Steph Curry, Viola Davis, and Samuel L. Jackson.
In 2023, Wallace was awarded the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for excellence in covering underrepresented or misrepresented populations. The judges proclaimed that Wallace’s “insightful and deeply touching voice shines through in his … affirming and incisive stories.” Wallace told the Tisch School that because he values compassion and consideration above all else, he focuses in his writing on “our shared humanity, and the struggles we go through to find love and liberation.”
Marking his book-length debut in 2019, Wallace served as collaborating author for Andre Iguodala’s The Sixth Man: A Memoir, a weeks-long best seller named one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. A member of the Golden State Warriors teams that won multiple NBA championships, Iguodala was often the “sixth man,” or first man off the bench, a pivotal role, and thanks to his clutch performances was named the Finals MVP in 2015. The memoir covers Iguodala’s youth in Illinois, with a mother who insisted on the importance of reading, and his success through advancing levels of elite basketball. In discussing his time with the Warriors, Iguodala depicts memorable on-court and locker-room drama while also delving into his and his teammates’ relationships, motivations, and inner lives. He also ruminates on sociological aspects of the basketball world.
In Booklist, Wes Lukowsky proclaimed that Iguodala and Wallace’s effort amounts to the “best basketball memoir since Bill Russell’s,” from fifty years earlier. A reviewer for Civilian Reader declared that Wallace has helped deliver a story not just of Iguodala’s life but “of his experience of the conflict and racial tension always at hand in a professional league made up largely of African American men; of whether and why the athlete owes the total sacrifice of his body; of the relationship between competition and brotherhood among the players of one of history’s most glorious championship teams.” This reviewer described The Sixth Man as a “superb memoir that is also a passionate, engaging meditation on race in America,” and Lukowsky called it “masterfully written, sometimes even poetic,” and a “very special book—a sports memoir for the ages.”
Wallace tells his own life story in Another Word for Love: A Memoir. He begins when, at age seven, he and his mother lacked a permanent home for a year. They endured the challenges, and Wallace found welcoming community as a theater kid, but his young adulthood led into a period of addiction, followed by recovery. In the early aughts, he became a father. Central to the memoir is Wallace’s identity as queer, with conventional masculinity representing a constricting force he had to fight against to achieve self-expression and self-fulfillment as a caring and compassionate person. He also consistently examines intersections between race relations in broader society and his personal life, from the Los Angeles riots of 1992 to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Throughout Wallace positions himself as a humanist, honoring intimacy and celebrating existence.
A Kirkus Reviews writer lauded Wallace’s “exquisite, soulful” memoir, declaring that the “narrative cadence ebbs and flows … almost hypnotically” and that the author’s “lyrical eye … lends rhythmic cohesion” to episodes that deftly integrate activity and memory. Especially appreciating how the text proves as “defiant in its honoring of beauty,” the reviewer hailed Another World for Love as an “intricate and exhilarating memoir–heartbreaking, humbling, and hopeful.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2019, Wes Lukowsky, review of The Sixth Man: A Memoir, p. 59.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2024, review of Another Word for Love: A Memoir.
ONLINE
Carvell Wallace website, https://www.carvellwallace.com (April 24, 2024).
Civilian Reader, https://civilianreader.com/ (September 17, 2020), review of The Sixth Man.
Feeld, https://feeld.co/ (October 30, 2023), “Feeld Interviews: Carvell Wallace.”
Heising-Simons Foundation website, https://www.hsfoundation.org/ (April 24, 2024), “Carvell Wallace: 2023 Recipient.”
New York University, Tisch School of the Arts website, https://tisch.nyu.edu/ (February 16, 2023), “Tisch Drama Alumnus Carvell Wallace Awarded American Mosaic Journalism Prize.”
San Quentin News, https://sanquentinnews.com/ (August 29, 2022), Harry C. Goodall Jr., review of The Sixth Man.
Slate, https://slate.com/ (April 24, 2024), author profile.
Vermont College of Fine Arts website, https://vcfa.edu/ (April 24, 2024), author profile.
Vox, https://www.vox.com/ (August 6, 2020), “About Carvell Wallace.”
About Carvell Wallace
Meet the Peabody Award-winning journalist and host of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America.
By Vox Creative Aug 6, 2020, 12:35pm EDT
Share this story
Share this on Facebook
Share this on Twitter
This advertising content was produced in collaboration between Vox Creative and our sponsor, without involvement from Vox Media editorial staff.
Part of Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
© Tai Power Seeff
Who We Are is hosted by Carvell Wallace, a New York Times bestselling author, memoirist and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film and music for a wide variety of news outlets.
He is a regular long form contributor to the New York Times Magazine where his profile of Riz Ahmed was a cover story in August 2018. He has additionally written cover profiles on Mahershala Ali for GQ and Samuel L. Jackson for Esquire. Other high-profile subjects have included Tarell Alvin McCraney for the New York Times, Viola Davis for Glamour, G-Eazy for MTV and Steph Curry for the New Yorker.
In 2019 Wallace published The Sixth Man, co-written with Golden State Warrior’s forward Andre Iguodala. The memoir of Iguodala’s life in basketball — released on Dutton press —- spent four weeks on the Times bestseller list for Hardcover Non-fiction, 14 weeks on the Sports Non-fiction list, and made Barack Obama’s year end list of favorite books. He is currently at work on a memoir on childhood trauma and recovery, “Profiles In Hurt,” due out in 2021 on the FSG imprint MCD
His 2017 podcast Closer Than They Appear explored race and identity in America and won a Radio Television Digital News Award for the episode in which he returns to his hometown to see a childhood friend for the first time in 27 years. His 10-episode podcast Finding Fred which focused on Fred Rogers teachings and their use within systems of oppressions, was named #1 podcast of 2019 by The Atlantic and was nominated for a Peabody Award
He has been a contributor to Pitchfork, ESPN The Magazine, The Guardian, and MTV News where he worked as a music columnist alongside Doreen St. Felix, Hanif Abrurraqib, Brian Phillips, Ira Madison, Jessica Hopper, and others during the fabled but short-lived 2016 re-invigoration of the platform. According to the Columbia Journalism Review Wallace “dips in and out of popular culture and sports journalism with seemingly effortless fluency. He writes about familiar topics and makes them feel new.”
In addition to his work on culture and entertainment, he has composed several notable longform reported memoirs including a 2016 effort for the now defunct The Toast in which he explored the origins of the Green Book as a meditation on migration, race and homelessness among the black population. His 2017 piece for MTV News “The Roots Of Cowboy Music” saw Wallace attending a cowboy poetry festival in the Nevada mountains and using the experience as an entrée into exploring isolation, loneliness, and the forgotten histories of black people. And his 2017 New Yorker work on the end of Barack Obama’s presidency was noted in 2018’s Best American Essays.
Before writing professionally, Carvell spent fifteen years in youth non-profit doing direct case management and program design for youth populations in incarceration, and foster care. He is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and holds a B.F.A. in Theatre from the Tisch School at New York University.
He lives in Oakland California and is the father to two teenagers.
Carvell Wallace
Visiting Writer
Profile
Carvell Wallace is a New York Times-bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film, and music for a wide variety of news outlets. He is a regular long-form contributor to the New York Times Magazine, where his profile of Riz Ahmed was a cover story in August 2018. He has additionally written cover profiles on Mahershala Ali for GQ and Samuel L. Jackson for Esquire.
In 2019 Wallace published The Sixth Man, co-written with Golden State Warrior’s forward Andre Iguodala. The memoir of Iguodala’s life in basketball — released on Dutton press — spent four weeks on the Times bestseller list for Hardcover Nonfiction, 14 weeks on the Sports Nonfiction list, and made Barack Obama’s year-end list of favorite books. He is currently writing a memoir childhood trauma and recovery, Profiles in Hurt, due out in 2021 on the MCDx FSG imprint. In addition to his work on culture and entertainment, he has composed several notable long-form reported memoirs, including a 2016 effort for the now defunct The Toast in which he explored the origins of the Green Book as a meditation on migration, race, and homelessness among the black population. He is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and holds a BFA in Theatre from the Tisch School at New York University. He lives in Oakland, California, and is the father to two teenagers.
Feeld Interviews: Carvell Wallace
Feeld
October 30th, 2023
As part of our interview series One Night Stands, writer Carvell Wallace talks to Feeld about ripe oranges, rewatching Living Single, and being his own icon.
Questions of desire and pleasure are everywhere around us, and they are most exciting when we explore them with openness and imagination. In our new interview series, we put a few playful questions to creatives who we believe are interrogating these questions in the boldest ways—whether through writing, film, art, or other mediums.
Carvell Wallace is a queer writer, parent, and podcaster based in Oakland, CA. He writes about love, relationships, culture, race, and trauma. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Slate, The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, MTV, ESPN, and other places.
My love language is:
Cooking for people, hosting people, people falling in love with each other on my couch while I do dishes and make tea for everyone.
Pure pleasure for me is:
A perfectly ripe orange.
I feel good when I’m wearing:
I spend a shameful amount of money on well-made sweatpants. When they are fresh out of the dryer and clean, they feel incredibly good on my body.
I feel most connected to myself when:
I crawl into bed at the end of a long day of dealing with gestures broadly this bullshit.
My most niche kink is:
Mutual masturbation and the smell of jasmine and/or sandalwood on clean sheets.
One thing I’ve learned about desire is:
I’ve learned that desire is a core part of my humanity, and I’ve learned to stop letting people's fear, trauma, violence, hate, etc. rob me of my ability to experience and own my desire.
I’ve always wanted to:
Work on one single creative project for six months or more, no side projects.
My best date was:
We met in a bakery, went to a boring work event, walked a quarter of the island and kissed in the park under a full moon.
My most memorable one-night stand was:
I’ve had some fun at parties.
On my nightstand you’ll always find:
A lamp that I love, lube, rose spray and a stack of books I’m “reading.” And also, some that I’m actually reading.
I always gather inspiration from:
The people I love and the people that love me well are an inspiration. I want to be like them.
My ideal/fantasy relationship is:
I truly have no idea. Maybe I’m too old for fantasies, there are so many wonderful things out there that my limited fantasies could never even think up. All the best stuff is in reality for me.
I’m currently listening to / watching / reading:
I’m scrolling IG compulsively. I’m reading Ling Ma short stories. I’m listening to Shaggy’s 1996 album Boombastic. I’m watching basketball and football and old episodes of Living Single and Newhart. I’m fascinated with how things used to be. I’m falling asleep to a nature documentary about a mama bear and her two cubs and the creation of the universe.
My style / life icons are:
I have a style crush on George McCalman. But at my big age, I’m pretty much my own icon.
You can usually find me:
At my desk, trying to find the words, asking the ancestors for guidance.
Recently I’ve discovered:
Brainwave frequency recordings, which may be bullshit but I’m up for whatever. Also, I recently had my first ever no-doubt, real-deal supernatural encounter, so whatever you discover after that is what I’ve recently discovered. Maybe that the veil between This Life and Other Life is thinner than I thought?
I wish more people knew:
How to turn themselves over to love. Me too, for that matter.
I love sharing:
Cum videos with the sound on, for people who enjoy that sort of thing.
The thing I couldn’t do without:
Sleep.
I currently can’t get enough of:
Time.
The work of art that changed everything for me is:
Obviously, hundreds of them, but I’m thinking a lot these days about how reading Toni Morrison’s Paradise in my early twenties probably had a bigger foundational effect on me than I realized at the time.
The best advice I’ve ever received is:
Just focus on doing the next right thing.
The last thing I loved was:
A re-heated bowl of sauteed bean curd and eggplant from East Ocean. Idk why but that shit was amazing.
I’m most looking forward to:
Making a home with a person I love.
I’m most turned on by:
Genuine safety and trust. Sorry to be boring but that’s what gets me off.
Carvell Wallace is a queer writer, parent, and podcaster based in Oakland, CA. He writes about love, relationships, culture, race, and trauma. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Slate, The New Yorker, GQ, Esquire, MTV, ESPN, and other places. Find him on Instagram.
TISCH DRAMA ALUMNUS CARVELL WALLACE AWARDED AMERICAN MOSAIC JOURNALISM PRIZE
THURSDAY, FEB 16, 2023
SHARE THIS
The Heising-Simons Foundation announced this week that Tisch Drama alumnus Carvell Wallace, Class of '07, was a recipient of the 2023 American Mosaic Journalism Prize.
The prize is awarded for excellence in reporting about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the United States. It recognizes journalism’s ability to foster understanding and aims to support freelance journalists. Wallace shared the 2023 award with a fellow freelance reporter, Cerise Castle.
As a magazine contributor, Wallace has written profiles in GQ, Esquire, Glamour, The New Yorker and The New York Times. “I’ve long thought that the only thing that really matters is how we treat each other,” said Wallace. “I view everything through this lens, whether it’s sports, culture, politics, art or film. It’s why I focus my writing on our shared humanity, and the struggles we go through to find love and liberation.”
CARVELL WALLACE
Carvell Wallace is a New York Times bestselling author, contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and a former Slate parenting columnist and co-host of Mom and Dad Are Fighting. He also hosted the Finding Fred podcast and writes for GQ, Esquire, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other outlets.
Carvell Wallace
2023 recipient
“Carvell Wallace’s insightful and deeply touching voice shines through in his journalism, from a feature story about America’s most prominent Black bike racer to a personal essay offering an unexpected angle to our country’s conversation about abortion access. Carvell’s work centers Black experiences with affirming and incisive stories that media sometimes overlooks.”
2023 JUDGES
Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster covering race, arts, culture, film, and music for a wide variety of news outlets. He lives in Oakland, California.
As a magazine contributor, he has written profiles in GQ, Esquire, Glamour, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He has also hosted multiple podcasts, including “Closer Than They Appear,” which explored race and identity in America, and “Finding Fred” which focused on Fred Rogers’ teachings and their use within systems of oppressions.
In 2019, Carvell co-authored “The Sixth Man” with Golden State Warriors forward Andre Iguodala. In that same year, he wrote a profile about Tarell Alvin McCraney for The New York Times Magazine.
Before beginning his writing and freelance career, Carvell spent 15 years in youth non-profit work doing direct case management and program design for youth populations in incarceration and foster care.
Carvell is currently at work on a memoir on childhood trauma and recovery, “Another Word For Love,” and is in development for a podcast about intimacy and liberation called Everyone Is Dying: a Podcast about Love with his creative partner Resham Mantri.
Carvell Wallace
Article
Talk
Read
Edit
View history
Tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Carvell Wallace (born October 20, 1974, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania) is a New York Times bestselling author,[1] writer, and podcaster. He is a regular contributor to Pitchfork,[2] MTV News,[3] the Huffington Post,[4] and Slate,[5][6] and has written for The New York Times,[7] New York Magazine,[8][9] GQ,[10] The Toast,[11] The Guardian,[12] The New Yorker,[13] Esquire,[14] Quartz,[15] ESPN,[16] and other publications. He is the creator and host of Finding Fred,[17] an iHeart Media documentary podcast about the life of Fred Rogers; host of Closer Than They Appear, an Al Jazeera podcast about race and identity in America,[18] and co-host of the Slate parenting podcast Mom & Dad Are Fighting.[5] He is co-writer of the Slate parenting advice column, Care & Feeding.[19][20] In 2019, he helped create the Sundance Institute exhibition Still Here,[21][22] an immersive multimedia installation about mass incarceration, erasure, and gentrification in Harlem, New York.
Early life
Wallace was raised by a working-class single mother[6] in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.[23] He had "a very chaotic childhood" but "was really obsessed with media" from a young age, namely TV shows and movies.[24] One of his early idols was Eddie Murphy.[24]
Education
Wallace became interested in acting when he was in ninth grade.[24] He graduated from Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and was admitted to New York University's Tisch School of Arts conservatory program. He graduated from the university with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Experimental Theatre in 1997.[21]
Career
Starting in 1997, Wallace spent 15 years working designing and running programs for incarcerated youth, foster youth, and at-risk youth in New York City and San Francisco.[5] His work involved working with "young people in foster care, employment programs, [and] probation and detention."[25] One of his projects involved designing an education intake and assessment model for youth released from Rikers Island and Spofford Detention Facility. Another project, undertaken in 2000, entailed the redesign and expansion of an organic farming employment program, under the auspices of the San Francisco League Of Urban Gardeners, for middle school-aged youth in the Bayview/Hunters Point neighborhood, during which time he taught on the subjects of sustainable farming, food security, and environmental justice. He was also tasked with creating a reentry to society program for youth from San Francisco County who were exiting long-term incarceration. Furthermore, he "wrote the curriculum for and ran the pilot for a career certificate training program for youth leaving foster care in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano counties."[26] In 2003, he created and taught a course for middle school-aged black youth which combined history with behavior modification and social skills development. He subsequently spent seven years as at Revolution Prep in Santa Monica, California.
During this time, Wallace co-founded Flourish Agenda[27] whose mission included outreach to "black youth in schools and community organizations to help overcome racial trauma and provide tools that are necessary for success." Also during this period, Wallace co-created the Vibosity app, which "allow[ed] kids to assess their own personal, social, and emotional growth,"[28] was a speaker at Alterconf San Francisco[29] as well as the San Francisco Tech Inclusion Conference,[26] and was named one of Echoing Green's Black Male Achievement Fellows.[25]
Wallace's writings began to appear in outlets such as The Toast in 2016, for which he wrote the in-depth history piece "The Negro Motorist Green Book and Black America's Perpetual Search For A Home."[30] The same year, he wrote a profile of NBA player Steph Curry, Wallace's first profile,[31] which was published in The New Yorker.[32] Starting in March 2016, he spent a year and six months as am MTV News Music Desk columnist,[3] writing on subjects ranging from Prince,[33] John Coltrane,[34] white rappers, and Aaliyah,[35] to Bernie Worrell,[36] De La Soul,[37] G-Eazy,[38] and Meghan Trainor.[39]
In 2017, Wallace wrote GQ's cover story on Mahershala Ali.[40] Among many writings of his that year, he teamed with Al Jazeera to start the Closer Than They Appear podcast, an exploration of race and identity in America. The podcast went on to win a Kaleidoscope Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association.[41]
In 2018, Wallace wrote Viola Davis's Woman of the Year piece for Glamour.[42] He also wrote Obama's Parting Gift, a story about the end of Barack Obama's presidency for The New Yorker, which earned a spot in 2018's Best American Essays.[43] The same year, his Al Jazeera podcast, Closer Than They Appear, received a favorable review from the Los Angeles Review of Books.[44]
On March 12, 2019, Esquire published Wallace's "Samuel L. Jackson Operates Like He Owns the Place. (He Does.)" as their cover story.[45] Also in 2019, Wallace helped the Golden State Warriors' Andre Iguodala write the book The Sixth Man: A Memoir, which ranked as a New York Times bestseller.[1] Wallace also created the iHeart Media podcast Finding Fred, a documentary podcast about the life of Fred Rogers,[17] garnering accolades such as being named the #1 Podcast of 2019 by The Atlantic.[46]
Awards and honors
Finding Fred, Wallace's documentary podcast about the life of Fred Rogers, named #1 Podcast of 2019 by The Atlantic.[46]
Finding Fred, Wallace's documentary podcast about the life of Fred Rogers, was voted one of the Best of 2019 by CBC Podcasts, the podcast branch of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.[47]
In June 2019, the Los Angeles Times placed The Sixth Man: A Memoir, the book Wallace helped the Golden State Warriors' Andre Iguodala write, on their list "7 buzzworthy June books to look out for."[48]
Kaleidoscope Award, granted by the Radio Television Digital News Association (2018)[41]
Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellow (2015)[25]
2023 American Mosaic Journalism Prize[49]
Personal life
Wallace struggled with drugs and alcohol in his 20s and 30s; alcoholism ran in his family.[24]
Wallace has a son, born in 2002, and a daughter, born in 2006.[6]
Podcasts
Date Show Episode Role
Nov. 29, 2019 One Bad Mother[50] "Episode 330: Sunday Sunday, Oh Sh*t Tomorrow's Monday! Plus, Carvell Wallace on Parenting and Fred Rogers" Guest
Nov. 22, 2019 It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, NPR[51] "Weekly Wrap: Dems Debate, Mister Rogers and WeWork" Guest
Nov. 15, 2019-Dec. 24, 2019 Finding Fred Series Host
Oct. 23, 2019 Longform[52] "Carvell Wallace" Guest
January 4, 2019 On Point, 90.9 WBUR[53] "Do Moms And Dads Know What They're Doing? A Closer Look At Parenting Advice" Guest
2017 Closer Than They Appear Series Host
Dec. 2013-ongoing Mom and Dad Are Fighting[54] Series Host
Carvell Wallace is a New York Times Bestselling author, memoirist, and award-winning podcaster who covers race, arts, culture, film and music for a wide variety of news outlets. He is a regular long form contributor to the New York Times Magazine where his profile of Riz Ahmed was a cover story in August 2018. He has additionally written cover profiles on Michael B. Jordan for Rolling Stone, Mahershala Ali for GQ and Samuel L. Jackson for Esquire. Other high-profile subjects have included Tarell Alvin McCraney for the New York Times, Viola Davis for Glamour, G-Eazy for MTV and Steph Curry for the New Yorker.
In 2019 Wallace published The Sixth Man, co-written with Golden State Warrior’s forward Andre Iguodala. The memoir of Iguodala’s life in basketball — released on Dutton press —- spent four weeks on the Times bestseller list for Hardcover Non-fiction, 14 weeks on the Sports Non-fiction list, and made Barack Obama’s year end list of favorite books. He is currently at work on a memoir on childhood trauma and recovery, “Another Word For Love” due out in 2023 on the FSG imprint MCD
His 2017 podcast Closer Than They Appear explored race and identity in America and won a Radio Television Digital News Award for the episode in which he returns to his hometown to see a childhood friend for the first time in 27 years. His 10-episode podcast Finding Fred which focused on Fred Rogers teachings and their use within systems of oppressions, was named #1 podcast of 2019 by The Atlantic and was nominated for a Peabody Award
He has been a contributor to Pitchfork, ESPN The Magazine, The Guardian, and MTV News where he worked as a music columnist alongside Doreen St. Felix, Hanif Abrurraqib, Brian Phillips, Ira Madison, Jessica Hopper, and others during the fabled but short-lived 2016 re-invigoration of the platform. According to the Columbia Journalism Review Wallace “dips in and out of popular culture and sports journalism with seemingly effortless fluency. He writes about familiar topics and makes them feel new.”
In addition to his work on culture and entertainment, he has composed several notable longform reported memoirs including a 2016 effort for the now defunct The Toast in which he explored the origins of the Green Book as a meditation on migration, race and homelessness among the black population. His 2017 piece for MTV News “The Roots Of Cowboy Music” saw Wallace attending a cowboy poetry festival in the Nevada mountains and using the experience as an entrée into exploring isolation, loneliness, and the forgotten histories of black people. And his 2017 New Yorker work on the end of Barack Obama’s presidency was noted in 2018’s Best American Essays.
He was the 2023 recipient of the American Mosaic Prize in Journalism for his essay What if My Mother Had an Abortion and his exploration of Black Horror for The Atlantic.
Before writing professionally, Carvell spent fifteen years in youth non-profit doing direct case management and program design for youth populations in incarceration, and foster care. He is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and holds a B.F.A. in Theatre from the Tisch School at New York University.
He lives in Oakland California and is the father to two teenagers. He lectures in the Narrative Department at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.
Wallace, Carvell ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (NonFiction None) $28.00 5, 14 ISBN: 9780374237820
The story of a poet and podcaster's journey to claim the fullness of his identity and power as a queer Black American.
Wallace begins with the year he was 7, when he and his mother spent a year without a home, a time "full of endings and tiny deaths." From there, he leads readers almost hypnotically through his youth as a theater kid, the tightrope of his addiction and recovery, and becoming a parent. The narrative cadence ebbs and flows, condensing a profession trajectory here, expanding a single morning there, and gently, seamlessly incorporating the memories that infiltrated and shaped the experience of each moment. Wallace's lyrical eye, sharpened to every detail, lends rhythmic cohesion to a series of events whose context spans from the Los Angeles riots in 1992 to the racial protests in the summer of 2020, and he consistently investigates the collision between the systemic and the personal. In the face of an inheritance of "terror and anger" and the countless indignities conferred on Black men in America, Wallace's text is defiant in its honoring of beauty, gratitude, and the care he takes to live and tell his story with intention. The author presses against the indoctrinating grip of traditional masculinity, with its insistence on power and control, interrogating its lessons about fear and intimacy to discover "love in a way I had been trained not to love--a love marked by awe, sensitivity, fragility, and relationships formed in consent and mutual respect. Whether writing about race, sex, climate change, or making bread, Wallace is unabashed about and humbled by the embodied human condition and the human longing for authentic connection, lending richness and vulnerability to the link between a writer and his readers. Ultimately, this is an intricate and exhilarating memoir--heartbreaking, humbling, and hopeful.
An exquisite, soulful must-read.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Wallace, Carvell: ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786185690/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=548650ed. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024.
The Sixth Man. By Andre Iguodala and Carvell Wallace. June 2019. 256p. Penguin/Blue Rider, $28 (9780525533986); e-book, $14.99 (9780525534006). 796.323092.
Iguodala is a member of the NBA world-champion Golden State Warriors. A classic sixth man (not a starter but the first player to come off an all-star, an all-defensive team selection, and a playoff-finals off-finals MVP. Next time you catch the Warriors, watch Iguodala when he's leading a fast break. His vision and anticipation border on genius. And now he's written, along with coauthor Wallace, the best basketball memoir since Bill Russell's Go up for Glory (1966), more than 50 years ago. We learn in this masterfully written, sometimes even poetic memoir that Iguodala was raised by a no-nonsense mother who insisted on young Andre becoming a reader--of all sorts of things, including newspapers. That experience clearly helped foster a broad worldview, a perspective on his own life, and a tolerance for individual idiosyncrasies. That last quality is critical for a great teammate, and, by all accounts, Iguodala is exactly that. There's plenty here about basketball, but the authors move well beyond the scores, hoops, and on-court drama that fill nearly all the pages of similar books. Iguodala is always focused on the relationships and motivations of his teammates and opponents. That insight, he shows, helps him bond with his teammates and defeat his opponents. This is a very special book--a sports memoir for the ages.--Wes Lukowsky
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Lukowsky, Wes. "The Sixth Man." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 17, 1 May 2019, p. 59. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A587366798/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d8df8b92. Accessed 4 Apr. 2024.
BOOK REVIEW: “The Sixth Man” By Andre Iguodala with Carvell Wallace
August 29, 2022 by Harry C. Goodall Jr.
Basketball can be a game of feet. It can rely on whether your shot is on or off that day. For a person who no longer appreciates the game, The Sixth Man, co-written by Carvell Wallace with NBA champion Andre Iguodala, is a must read.
The gripping best-seller calls it “a game of pounding joints and crushing bones, ligaments ripped and healed, broken. It happens fast and without apology.”
Iguodala takes the reader through what could be termed as real-life situations. It is not a celebrity recounting of events, but a realistic, artful, back-down-memory-lane recollection. It immediately can bring a smile to your face and have you remember in a flashback when he references getting his butt whipped by his grandmother for something he shouldn’t have done.
His mention of getting his butt whipped at school was a hilarious flashback, too, probably for many Americans to identify with.
The Sixth Man was well-written and Iguodala gave a good recounting of pivotal moments in his life and his career that helped shaped him into who he is today.
“By waking up every day, playing basketball, doing what I loved doing since I was a kid, doing it at the highest level, and getting paid handsomely to do it, I was quite literally living a dream,” he writes.
Reading through the book left no dry areas. It’s a good page-turner that holds your interest through and though. It immediately grabs your attention and takes you to old times of racist ideologies when he mentioned how segregated the town he grew up in was.
His recount of the atrocity of 1908 in Springfield will chill you to your core. For a person who has never seen Illinois, the book gives you a great vision of what was going through Iguodala’s mind as he aged.
“When you come from a town like Springfield, you just don’t know how you compare to the entire world that is out there,” Iguodala writes.
The Sixth Man recounts how members of Iguodala’s family played significant roles in his development in a momentous fashion.
“I could make a future. Championships and trophies. Commercials and investments. Interviews and cars. Olympics and bank accounts… what I could see was as far away from Springfield, Illinois, as anything could ever be,” he writes.
The real life examples of how injury can make your life and take away the game you love are displayed. He highlights the people who made his career what it was and is, which isn’t a glorification of his life, but a tale of how his support network helped to mold and shape his life.
As for the season, “Whatever happened last season is over” sums up not only the games of last season, but the struggle within life. In essence, the memoir is telling readers that it’s always better for us to be a better version of who we are and who we were.
Quick Review: THE SIXTH MAN by Andre Iguodala & Carvell Wallace (Blue Rider Press)
September 17, 2020 Civilian Reader ReviewAndre Iguodala, Basketball, Biography, Blue Rider Press, Carvell Wallace, Golden State Warriors, Memoir, Must Read 2019, NBA, Non-Fiction
IguodalaA-SixthManUSPBA superb memoir that is also a passionate, engaging meditation on race in America
Andre Iguodala is one of the most admired players in the NBA. And fresh off the Warriors’ fifth Finals appearance in five years, his game has never been stronger.
Off the court, Iguodala has earned respect, too — for his successful tech investments, his philanthropy, and increasingly for his contributions to the conversation about race in America. It is no surprise, then, that in his first book, Andre, with his cowriter Carvell Wallace, has pushed himself to go further than he ever has before about his life, not only as an athlete but about what makes him who he is at his core.
The Sixth Man traces Andre’s journey from childhood in his Illinois hometown to his Bay Area home court today. Basketball has always been there. But this is the story, too, of his experience of the conflict and racial tension always at hand in a professional league made up largely of African American men; of whether and why the athlete owes the total sacrifice of his body; of the relationship between competition and brotherhood among the players of one of history’s most glorious championship teams. And of what motivates an athlete to keep striving for more once they’ve already achieved the highest level of play they could have dreamed.
On drive, on leadership, on pain, on accomplishment, on the shame of being given a role, and the glory of taking a role on: This is a powerful memoir of life and basketball that reveals new depths to the superstar athlete, and offers tremendous insight into most urgent stories being told in American society today.
I’ve been on a bit of a basketball kick, recently. The NBA’s restart in Orlando has been playing in the background since it began (except for Raptors games, which I give the games my full attention). I decided that it was time to read The Sixth Man, Andre Iguodala’s acclaimed memoir. Co-authored by journalist Carvell Wallace, I had pretty high expectations. The book completely blew these expectations out of the water, and I blitzed through it. A superb book about basketball, life and race in America.
Far more than a sports memoir, The Sixth Man is an engaging, passionate and important examination of race in America, the way business intersects with entertainment, and certain exploitative aspects of each. It’s a highly quotable book, but I’ve tried to restrain myself in this review. I could have written so much more about this book, and what Iguodala covers. It’s a fantastic book.
Iguodala covers in engaging detail his evolving understanding of the game and business of college basketball and sports, and also the NBA: how it is not quite the dream factory many are led to believe, and how there’s far more going on under the surface, and away from the cameras than fans understand. For example, the exploitative nature of NCAA sports, the multi-billion dollar business built of under-paid teenage athletes: “NCAA basketball is a racket. And the players are the only ones losing.” Many of the issues he writes about have gained far greater attention in recent years, and his perspective is a valuable and illuminating addition.
“I would learn that the higher up you go in this game, the more replaceable you become. I would learn that being the best was not a guarantee of a career, that a career was made of myriad things, of small, boring things. Of good agents and early morning workouts. Of medical procedures and yoga and nutritionists. Of sleep hygiene and the ability to tamp your emotions down so hard that they first become stones and then diamonds that you only reveal when there are three seconds on the clock and you are down by two points and you have to see, understand, and predict the movements of ten men on a basketball court at one time, while 45,000 people are screaming at you.”
His experiences in the league and before seem to have given Iguodala a cautious relationship with coaches, a group for whom he often expresses distrust — after all, players are just cogs in a machine, replaceable if they no longer contribute to the smooth running of championship strategies. His experiences — in Philly and later while on the Warriors — would also breed a distrust in the media, which is entirely understandable and justifiable, all things considered.
Well-read and an autodidact, Iguodala’s passion for learning — especially history, politics, business — shines through in The Sixth Man, as he frames his life and professional experiences in the context of race in America. It’s a wide-ranging discussion, spread across the memoir and story of his life. Each time, it’s perfectly interwoven with his story or the experience he’s relating at the time. For example, he describes what he thinks of as his earliest encounter with race as an issue: being asked for proof that he belonged in an AP class at school, effectively asked for his papers by a teacher of an otherwise all-white class. He also writes about
“… the occasional referee who reminds you a little too much of the police officers that stalked your neighborhood when you were a kid, glowering at you and your friends as though you were dangerous animals escaped from captivity rather than children—a look that gives you a cold chill, a fight-or-flight response that will lie dormant and coiled and always ready to spring at the base of your spine for the rest of your life.”
Iguodala also writes about how often he’s reminded of his blackness, playing in regions that are less diverse. For example, how “Salt Lake City has always had a certain effect on me as a player. I always feel—I don’t know how else to say it—blacker when I’m in Utah.” How the thoughts going through his head in that arena, as “a black person on a floor in shorts and a tank top being screamed at simultaneously by eighteen thousand white people, who are flipping you off and spitting and foaming at the mouth, and not feel some deep, primordial, almost-cellular sense of threat,” and how “everything felt much more ominous because this was two weeks after Trump had been elected.” The spectre of Trump hangs over much of the authors’ discussion of race and the American experience today, and it’s very well done.
Iguodala also has this to say about Oklahoma, which I thought was a perfect encapsulation of how many outside of the country see America:
“Oklahoma City was the only arena in the nation where they prayed before the national anthem. And still we spent the entire game being told, ‘Fuck you,’ while armed guards made sure no one rushed the court.”
The book is also filled with interesting, generous and often endearing portraits of his teammates and friends, while also not shying away from more honest criticism when necessary. He writes about the elation and strain of being a champion, maintaining that status, and chasing records. (The Warriors seem to have basically exhausted themselves over their championship runs and afterwards.) In addition to writing about the aforementioned exploitative and physically gruelling nature of professional sports, Iguodala also writes about his medical journey — the injuries, training regimens to maintain peak physical abilities to compete at the highest levels, and also the “bizarre and a little bit ghoulish” blood treatments he’s been undergoing later in his career.
Beautifully written, quietly passionate, thoughtful and thought-provoking. One of my favourite reads of the year, one of the best memoirs I’ve read, and easily the best book connected to basketball that I’ve read.
Very highly recommended.