This piece first appeared on African Feminism. As people living at the intersection of multiple oppressions, legacies of slavery and colonialism, and neocolonial capture of our nations, we must remain extremely vigilant for erasure and appropriation of our voice and agency. African feminisms cannot exist in spaces where struggles of other colonized . . .
Read More
Sometimes I think of my life as a big container with others stacked inside it, like one of those wooden Russian dolls they sell at Christmas. Chris—the smallest—insideNiagara Falls, insideMateo, insidemy film notebook, insidemy job at FALLOUT, the outer shell If only I could get down to the innermost container—the essential, most . . .
Read More
It’s been reported: in Bucha,people are collecting bodies stuffedwith bullets, hands tied behind their backs.—from M. Cynthia Cheung’s “The Amount of Death and Pain in the City Was Extraordinary,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.Around the time I began writing poetry, I . . .
Read More
. . . THE PHOTOCOPIER.If called on to produce more than a dozen double-sided copies, it began to overheat, and on its worst days, Jeanie’s efforts ended in the abduction of one pristine sheet after another into the machine’s inscrutable bowels. There the paper was tightly accordioned, the copier’s companionable hum abruptly . . .
Read More
Brian Morton, known best for his novels Florence Gordon, Breakable You, and Starting Out in the Evening (the latter of which was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner award), has turned his skill to a book on craft. Morton, a Guggenheim fellow and winner of the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts . . .
Read More
Detective Varela calls it an interview room, but it looks an awful lot like the interrogation rooms in Law and Order. Over-airconditioned, scuffed floors, grubby walls, one-way mirror, rickety chair to keep you on edge. Paper coffee cups litter the tabletop. Goosebumps popping on your arms and legs, rubbing against your soft . . .
Read More
I used to have a house full of sisters and a dress that smelled like oranges. I used to have a braid—from Caroline Harper New’s “Loom,” Volume 66, Issue 2 (Summer 2025) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I wrote my first poem in 5th grade about a purple polka-dot . . .
Read More
For several years in her twenties, Ruth lived with a man who did not believe in happiness. When she thought of Edwin later, she remembered him in motion: pacing the uneven floors of their studio apartment, slamming cabinet doors, frying eggs, spattering oil. Always espousing various theories of living, his red hair . . .
Read MoreJuly 26th was a day like many others in Gaza. I woke up at 8:00 a.m. to fetch four gallons of potable water from the truck that would come every day to the school where my family and I had been displaced. After completing that daily mission, I was already exhausted. I . . .
Read More
In Issa Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, the unnamed narrator mythologizes a series of figuresthat he directly or indirectly encounters, including a disgraced teacher and the student he seduced and forever changed; a lonely bus driver in Boston; a disabled landlord who mourns the lesbian aunt his family abandoned; and other strangely compelling . . .
Read More