Carvell Wallace
Carvell Wallace is a writer and podcaster who has contributed to The New Yorker, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Pitchfork, MTV News, and Al Jazeera. His debut memoir, Another Word for Love (MCD, 2024), was a 2024 Kirkus Finalist in Nonfiction. He co-wrote The Sixth Man (Dutton Press, 2019) with Golden State Warrior’s forward Andre Iguodala. He was a 2019 Peabody Award nominee, a 2022 National Magazine Award Finalist, a 2023 winner of the Mosaic Prize in Journalism, and a 2025 UCross Fellow. Before writing professionally, Carvell spent fifteen years in youth non-profit work 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.
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Another Word for Love
Once, I read a story—or maybe I imagined a
story—of two children ages eight and twelve
discovering the dead body of the grandmother
who was taking care of them. The older child,
a girl, took responsibility then. Feeding her
younger brother, covering the body, keeping
life going, until the smell got too much, and
they asked a neighbor for help. They were, of
course, rescued. But I often wonder what they
were rescued from. It is good, of course, if
they were brought into a place of safety,
steady reliable meals, home, and hopefully
love and care. But somewhere in me the feeling
of hurtling alone is itself the feeling of
home, a human truth the size of the universe,
the size of my mother and me in a motel with
no future to be certain of. I would never want
that for myself or for my children. I would
never want that for anyone. And yet sometimes,
I want it for myself.
Excerpts from ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE: A MEMOIR by Carvell Wallace. Copyright © 2024 by Carvell Wallace. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
Another Word for Love- Print Books
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Another Word for Love
The second time someone pointed a loaded gun at my face I was seventeen. I mean it was my fault because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That wrong place was in the alley behind my apartment building in Los Angeles, California, and that wrong time was April 29, 1992, at 4:48 in the afternoon. That was day one of the Los Angeles Riots. Someone in another building called the police on me because I had gone out there to sneak a cigarette and I looked to them like a person who might burn down the building and loot the apartment, which is to say I looked Black. When two LAPD cars came screaming up to me, I didn’t know what was happening. Their guns were in my face before I could truly comprehend what it meant to once again have guns in my face.
There is a funny thing that happens at the beginning of an exchange like that, a moment when you know that someone has decided that they might kill you if they feel like it, and it has literally nothing to do with who you actually are or what you are doing, but instead with what they have decided you are, with what they have been telling themselves for centuries that you are.
Excerpts from ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE: A MEMOIR by Carvell Wallace. Copyright © 2024 by Carvell Wallace. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
Another Word for Love- Print Books
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Carvell Wallace’s writing is at once revelatory and discreet. It is a testament to radical care, practicing vulnerability to transform ache and memory into tenderness. His is a work of coming to terms with the odds, surviving them, and doing so with grace, radiance, generosity, and spirit.