Blog / Our America

Unwavering Clarity of Purpose

October 13, 2023 - By Mary Bombardier

(Juanita Morrow Nelson. Photo by Ed Hedemann, 2010)

I've been thinking of Juanita Nelson lately. What would she think of the state of the world right now, our relationships to the earth, to one another. What would she say about how we are living?

Juanita was one of the few people I’ve met in my life who truly lived her values. Fill in the latest buzzword for community engagement and social justice work—relational, transformational, liberatory—she embodied it. She embodied these principles with ease because they were part of everything she did. And she did it without the ego and arrogance that can often consume those of us who strive to be authentically part of social justice movements.

Over the past thirty years, I have worked at the intersection...

Open Letter to President Magill

September 28, 2023 - By Anna Botta and Jim Hicks

26 September 2023

Dear President M. Elizabeth Magill:

My wife Anna Botta and I have many wonderful memories from our days as graduate students in Comparative Literature at Penn in the late eighties and early nineties. One in particular will serve to frame and reflect our complex experience this past weekend, when we attended the Palestine Writes literary festival in Irvine Auditorium on the University of Pennsylvania campus.

As you will see, our feelings—of both pride and indignation—during and following the festival are not easy to summarize; that may indeed be the reason our thoughts turned to a light-hearted essay that a certain saintly scholar once wrote to encapsulate his own sense of what academic conferences are all about. Gerry Prince—who was...

Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic

September 25, 2023 - By Earl Douglas, Jr. and Darrell M. McNeill

(Photo: from the BRC photo gallery, “30 Years of Reclaiming & Correcting the Rock Aesthetic”)

The Black Rock Coalition emphatically and wholeheartedly condemns Jann Wenner’s thoughtless misogynistic and racist statements in the New York Times regarding women and Black artists. While his comments were beyond reprehensible, they are no major revelation to Black artists who’ve struggled with the White rock establishment from Day One: Wenner only confirmed and re-emphasized how mass media outlets have—and continue to...

Open Letter to the APAC administration

July 17, 2023 - By The Editors of the Massachusetts Review

July 17, 2023

To the Administrators of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center:

We, the editors of the Massachusetts Review, are writing to express our deep disappointment and concern regarding the recent and very unexpected cancellation of this year’s Asian American Literary Festival, just weeks before its opening and after over a year of planning and investment, in both human and monetary terms, by countless organizations and individuals. This year’s festival was more important than ever, following the last several years of anti-Asian violence and hate crimes in the U.S., and we know many writers from around the world who made plans to attend and bring their creative energies together at this critical time. The last-minute cancellation of the...

Resurrection

January 2, 2023 - By Erri De Luca

“I would like to open a door”—the sentence was uttered by a prisoner on death row for decades now, in San Quentin. For decades now he has not touched the handle of a door.

California has repudiated capital punishment, but when Jarvis Masters was sentenced to death the gas chambers were still working.

I’ve read his life story, recorded by the journalist, David Sheff: A Buddhist on Death Row (Simon & Schuster, 2020, Italian translation, Emanuela Alverà, Uniliber). Masters began practicing controlled breathing and meditation...