Joy Harjo's recent Opinion Piece in the New York Times on the recent SCOTUS opinion:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/mcgirt-oklahoma-muscogee-creek-nation.html

I wasn't able to record our Zoom session, but I have compiled a list of authors we discussed, along with additions. You'll also find two links: one to an interesting article on LitHub about expanding the canon of Black writers, and links to the podcast I referenced during our session. 

Chinua Achebe, Chiamanda Ngozi Adichie, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Octavia Butler, Edwidge Danticat, W.E.B Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Alex Haley, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Marlon James, Naguib Mahfouz, Toni Morrison, Helen Oyeyemi, Claudia Rankine, Tayeb Salih, Zadie Smith, Natasha Tretheway, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, John Edgar Wideman, Richard Wright

And consider this article posted at LitHub:

Toward an Expanded Canon of Black Literature

The panel discussion I mention from Stanford Humanities Center (first link is to the website, the second is to the same as a podcast):

https://shc.stanford.edu/multimedia/representations-race-and-ethnicity-art-and-literature

Representations of Race and Ethnicity in Art and Literature

The Odyssey is a nostos, the story of a hero's return. To get home, Odysseus must journey through the underworld. That particular journey is called the nekyia, and is a key element in the structure of an epic.

As we began to discuss and query in class: just where is home for Odysseus? Where is the Ithaca of Homer's Odyssey. Here are a few resources on that question, including some maps to supplement those included in your book.

Ithaca, generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca

Homer's Ithaca: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer%27s_Ithaca

Geography of the Odyssey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_the_Odyssey

A wealth of links on the geography, as surmised from the 12th Century to 2010: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~jburgess/rop/pages/bibliography.html

The mystery continued at Odysseus Unbound: http://www.odysseus-unbound.org/

My personal favorite: The Authoress of the Odyssey, Samuel Butler's theory: http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/authoress-odyssey-1897

An interactive map: http://www.classics.upenn.edu/myth/php/homer/index.php?page=odymap

A map of Homeric Greece:

We meet in less than a week and our first reading is Sophocles' Antigone. There's a remarkable opportunity to see a production at BAM coinciding with the timing of our discussion. With Juliette Binoche, translation by Anne Carson.