From the Blog

10 Questions for Ifa Bayeza

September 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In three interconnected plays, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of the epic of Emmett Till and the birth the modern Civil Rights Movement, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself, in his final days of life, as a specter during the trial of his killers and a shadowed presence in the aftermath.
—Excerpt from Ifa Bayeza's "The Till Trilogy," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not counting “Mahatma Gandhi, Man of Peace,” which I presented to my fourth grade class after discovering him in the World Book Encyclopedia and reading “What Negroes Can Learn from Gandhi” in LOOK magazine (I guess I might call that a...

Testifying at the Democratic National Convention

September 6, 2024 - By Willow Naomi Curry

In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democrats spoke at the Democratic National Convention, despite attempts to suppress them. Fannie Lou Hamer’s televised testimony of being threatened and nearly beaten to death, to prevent her registering Black Mississipians to vote, turned the political tide in the United States. Subsequent pressure from the American populace forced President Lyndon B. Johnson to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Sixty years later, in 2024, Uncommitted Democrat delegates were denied a chance to speak at the DNC.

Both the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Uncommitted delegations were democratically elected representatives of Democrat voters. Both supported the National Democratic Party under the condition of true democratic representation of the...

10 Questions for Nathalie Harty

September 3, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In the village we let the nail go deep into the foot until picking up tetanus like
a surprise. We watch each other live, we turn to see every car that passes: it’s
winter’s fierce dance as it wraps us in its cure for lethargy.

I don’t know what it will take to be strong enough, with bedroom wi-fi needed
half the time to know how to look at the earth’s stark naked body.
—from Marie-Andrée Gill's "In the Village," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The first literary translation I did was an excerpt of La route du lilas by Quebec novelist Eric Dupont. This long novel follows seventy-year-old Maria Pia. With the help of Americans...

A Hellscape of False Options

August 30, 2024 - By Anima Adjepong

IN HER ACCEPTANCE SPEECH for the DNC’s nomination, Kamala Harris promised to secure the nation’s borders and to advance U.S. security and values abroad. She assured voters that under her leadership, America will have “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” The expansion of US military bases in Africa through the AFRICOM program, alongside efforts to control energy and mineral resources in Sudan and Congo, are examples of what the most lethal fighting force in the world does. The record shows, in fact, that the U.S. consistently works to destabilize progressive governments and enable genocides. In a key moment of her speech, Harris reaffirmed the United...

10 Questions for Sabina Murray

August 26, 2024 - By Brooke Chandler

No form of art can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals—encounters, challenges, and relationships—as successfully as the book-length work of fiction. Perhaps this is because of the amount of detail provided for characters and their situations, which allows us to truly experience as they do, but beyond this, the living quality of novels is best understood by considering time: the time we take to read, but also the manipulation of time upon the page. All readers casually understand this, but it is worth looking at a few scientific concepts, in particular some properties of time, to better comprehend how it works.
—from Sabina Murray's "The Order of the Novel,...