There Is No “Appropriation Prize”
There are a couple of things I try to emphasize when I teach writing workshops. One: writing is not an innate talent that some people are born with and others are not. Two: writing is not a thing to be won.
Confession, Communion: Three Poetry Chapbooks & Religion
This month, I read work concerning religion in one way or another, though the chapbooks here are not dominated by or entrenched in it as a theme. Instead these three writers use religion and spirituality as a lens through which readers can view many aspects of their poetry.
The Heart in Exile, the Original Queer Detective Noir Novel
Garland uses the detective story to place the gay experience of the era through a guided lens. The novel opens in a way you’ve heard before: a mysterious woman enters a man’s office unannounced. Only, the office isn’t a private eye’s but a bisexual psychiatrist’s, and the woman’s dead
Review: THE RULES DO NOT APPLY by Ariel Levy
A staff writer for The New Yorker, Ariel Levy describes her beat as “women who are too much.
Five Essays That Confront the Painful Realities of Black Suffering
These articles are by no means an answer to a dangerous societal deficit that constantly stereotypes, punishes, and kills Black people. But the conversations that they both start and continue are ones that need to be had.
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: The Tragic Possibilities
Tragedy opens up aesthetic possibilities, allowing suprahuman forces to partake as literary subjects that overwhelm individual characters. It is a mode of expression that goes beyond what realistic fiction can provide.
Imagining the Anthropocene: The Dissolving, Consuming Selves of Jane Wong’s Overpour
Landscape sculptor Andy Goldsworthy has said, “The field is a beautiful forum for the fight for nourishment.” Jane Wong brings that forum to the page.
Sociology Texts That Read Like Novels
Social science doesn’t have to be dry and statistics-laden. Sociology writing can be as vivid and gripping as fiction, when done well. Luckily there’s no shortage of compelling US sociology books, or sociologists.
Why Poetry Is Difficult
Because there is language. Humanoids happened, then Homo sapiens happened, and somewhere down the line, we started to talk. Why? Because pictures weren’t enough. Because pictures, dazzling as they were (and still are), are a little less portable, less mutable to the nuances of our shifting perceptions.
Why Latinx Writers Should Decenter the Narratives That Have Been Weaponized Against Us
Just last week, I received maybe the first piece of editorial advice that I felt compelled to flat out reject: that Latinx writers have a moral obligation to not write stories in which Latinx characters are portrayed in the context of the drug war or violence or anything else