From DEATH AND TAXES: The first time I listened to Beyoncé’s “Formation,” I was en route to the Brooklyn Museum for an event commemorating Black History Month. While sitting in the back of a cab, I held my phone close to my face, trying to relate to what Black Twitter instantly embraced as a groundbreaking […]
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am currently reading Lan Samantha Chang‘s Hunger, and it’s one of the best decisions I’ve made so far this year. It’s a short story collection with a novella recommended to me by my friend Sara Finnerty Turgeon. The novella is nothing short […]
…by Melissa Moorer on THE TOAST “Jones’ poetry often invokes a sense of intimate nostalgia — a warm thirst for a moment or a place that was, or that could have been. The verses change pace on a dime. They vibrate.” — Jairo Ramos at NPR: Code Switch. “we tested our faith in stories of […]
Frightful Weather Outside (A You Tube Video) Brian Gilmore (as published in Fjords Review – Black American Special Edition 2015) 2006 Freddie Que dressed up as Santa Claus. Handing out small gifts to kids in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. People around him passing by looking for a cocaine fix and there […]
POETS ONLINE TALKING ABOUT COFFEE: RION SCOTT Would you rather drive a really fast car or drink a really strong coffee? I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than drink a really strong coffee. Coffee is made when the devil passes water. Tea, however, is the true blood of the living God. Read the […]
The Writers’ Workshop and The Rona Jaffe Foundation are delighted to announce that the 2015-2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing has been awarded to Monica West, who will enroll in the program’s Graduate Fiction Workshop this fall. The fellowship, which pays tuition and a generous stipend, is granted each year to a first-year woman student […]
Why You Should Read Him Because you’re tired of seeing/reading the same people, the same stories over and over. The people of Rion Amilcar Scott’s world are people who share our cities, but for most of this country, for white people like me, they may as well be on another planet, in a science fiction […]
Building a Better Canon: Stories of the Mixed Experience I grew up an awkward, bookish mixed kid. I didn’t feel like I fit in with most of the kids around me partly due to my desire to hang out in the library instead of the soccer field, and partly because of my weird family. My […]
Paradox Lana closed the bedroom door firmly behind her, but it didn’t block out their noise. Even in the elusive moments when screams and screeches and sobbing stopped bouncing off of every solid surface, the reverberation remained. No stranger to self-sacrifice, Lana had done what she was expected to do, until, of course, she discovered […]
Dianca London Potts, on behalf of the The School of Writing at The New School and the NBCC, interviewed Claudia Rankine about her book Citizen (Graywolf), which is among the final five selections and final four selections in the categories of Criticism and of Poetry, respectively, for the 2014 NBCC awards. Dianca London Potts: The hybridity […]
