CLEVELAND — Writer Quartez Harris won’t be difficult to find around here in 2025.
Just wander into a Cuyahoga County, Ohio, bookstore and you’ll have a decent chance of spotting Harris, his locs tight and his smile ever-present.
Or make your way to a book fair like the one Harris starred in earlier this month in Philadelphia. You might catch him there.
Harris, 34, is finding these are the best of times for him as he watches his biographical picture book “Go Tell It,” a homage to the late novelist and social critic James Baldwin, play to heady reviews.
The Southern Bookseller Review, as an example, described Harris’s book as: “Stunning, poetic, honest, and celebratory – what an incredible picture book for school-age kids and their families and classrooms. Gordon James captures Baldwin’s dynamic passion for books and words in beautiful, high-energy paintings.”
Kirkus Reviews said: “A superb introduction to a master of the craft and a work of art in and of itself.
You can almost hear Harris say ah-shucks to the latter, but he can grab hold to the first part of the Kirkus review and revel in the words. His affinity toward Baldwin goes back a long way.”
As a teenager, Harris fell in love with Baldwin’s words — spoken and written.
“He was such an eloquent speaker, and I think it was his voice that drew me in,” said Harris, winner of the prestigious 2021 Ohio Poetry Association’s Poet of the Year Award for his collection of poems in “We Made It to School Alive.” “I loved how his mind worked,” Harris said.
What Harris has created is a book that speaks to youth, as his collection of poetry. He crafted “Go Tell It,” a rife on Baldwin’s celebrated semi-autobiographical novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” for younger readers. He said he wanted to put onto library shelves and in bookstores a nonfiction story that would resonate with them, so he kept “Go Tell It” focused on Baldwin’s boyhood and young adulthood.
Harris ended his book before Baldwin, penniless and unknown, left the United States in his early 20s and settled into the culturally enlightened Left Bank in Paris. Harris’s book introduces those new to Baldwin to his youthful years in Harlem and in the Pentecostal church.
The point he stressed in “Go Tell It” was how James Baldwin became, well … James Baldwin. In piecing his book together, Harris saw some of himself in Baldwin, a high-school dropout but perhaps the most celebrated Black writer ever.
Despite no high-brow academic credentials, Baldwin discovered a complete education could come from outside a structured class. He became a vociferous reader; Baldwin read everything.
And reading was the thread that connected him and Harris.
Growing up in Cleveland, Harris struggled to meet the expectations of educators. They warehoused him, which they often did to Black males in this city, in classes that lacked academic rigor. Many of Harris’ teachers viewed him as incapable of comprehending what he read or of using the English language properly.
“I didn’t really identify with language,” he said. “I didn’t know it belonged to me. Words belonged to me.”
Harris discovered ways to interpret his words. Using poetry as his vehicle, he started to play with them. Just like Baldwin did in his adolescence, Harris toyed with noun and verb
combinations and fiddled with words in his mind as if they were a Rubik’s cube that he needed to put together. Once he did, Harris was creating music with his poetry. The right words made songs.
“You might not understand the song,” Harris said. “But it can make you feel something inside.”
The praise the book “Go Tell It” has brought Harris’s way has been heady stuff, and it has left him with feelings of his own.
“I am full of glee,” he said.
His book is everywhere in Cleveland, and so it seems is Harris, a former teacher who’s married with a young son. His agent has his schedule packed with appearances, which include a speaking event February 19 at the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Library in suburban Cleveland.
He is contracted with Little, Brown and Company, a nearly two-century-old publisher based in New York City. And he is working on a full-fledged novel, which will put his use of words to the test.
But Harris won’t be able to shake his book on Baldwin for a while. How can he? Baldwin, who would have turned 100 last August, wrote and spoke about troubled times in America, times that made him flee to Paris in 1948 before returning to immerse himself in the emerging Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His short story “Sonny’s Blues” reflected those unsettling times.
Interest in Baldwin and his prose has now resurfaced.
“People are looking at Baldwin — his voice is still raging — because of the political climate we’re in,” Harris said. “I find it cool that we’re celebrating his legacy.”
