Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights Brooklyn and Other Identities (1992), like Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 is from Smith's On the Road series and employs the same technique. Its focus event is the rioting in the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn after the accidental killing of a black child by a Jewish rabbi. Text available as an Anchor Book from Doubleday.

The Hunger Wall, is a collection of poems by James Ragan, inspired by the Los Angeles civil unrest of 1992 and the peaceful breakup of the former Czechoslovakia a month later (Grove Press, 1995).

Spell #7 (1979), a play by Ntozke Shange, offers a tremendous contrast to Smith's work in technique, although both writers are African American women interested in efforts to find an identity in a white-dominated culture.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), James Agee' s photo-essay study of Georgia sharecroppers gives voice...