Curated playlist of music that inspired our 2024 Fall artist, Mike Ousley, as he created the artwork featured within our issue:
"Wildcat & Snake"
Brushy Fork of St. John’s Creek By Daniel Sherrill
"Night Train"
Old Train by the Tony Rice Unit
"Company Town"
Sally Ann by Dirk Powell
"Cults Are Fun"
Little Things by Adrian Berenguer
"Come With Me"
Hainted Ground by...
The last spring shall come, the last summer, too,
so no to politicians peddling impotence, no
to preachers stitching our lips into eclipse, we want
the misfits, the women unafraid of descent,
—from "Self-Portrait Lined By Sándor Csoóri," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Jackie & Simone: For our new collection, The Under Hum, one of the first pieces we wrote was “Disclosure,” which developed into a sonnet, and one of our goals at the outset was to extend the feminist project of interrogating traditional (male) forms. Pointedly, then, we “turn” the argument of the poem at the end of the first quatrain with the...
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
—June Jordan, Moving Towards Home
Editor’s note: June Jordan wrote this poem in 1982, after Sabra and Shatila. This week, as the world marked the forty-second anniversary of Sabra and Shatila, Israel carried out...
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Editor’s note: It has been 200 days since Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire to protest the United States-Israel genocide in Gaza. In solidarity and unwavering resistance, we offer this found abecedarian, drawn from “Burnt Offerings” by Erik Baker, and other sources.
Aaron...
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...
