recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
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Category: Literature and the Arts
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By Rashod Ollison: When I first read James Baldwin at about age sixteen, I didn’t quite understand everything in Notes of a Native Son. But I knew the powerful prose was important and that I would return to it. Baldwin at that point had been dead for close to a decade. I’d come across a…
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A Q&A with Gayle Brandeis: I started writing the book from a place of trauma, with a lot of anger toward her, and I ended it with so much love and admiration for her in my heart. It’s a gift I hadn’t anticipated, even though I knew writing about her would be the best way…
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By Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page: In June 2015 a surprising number of Americans stopped to gawk at a thirty-seven-year-old “African American” woman named Rachel Dolezal who, after an almost decade-long act, was outed by her parents as a white woman who chose to pass as black. The national response, culminating in a Today show…
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By Sasha Pimentel: I didn’t know that my poetry collection For Want of Water had been selected as winner for the National Poetry Series for a good week or two after Gregory Pardlo had chosen it, but that was my fault. I’d spent the summer with my family in Sonora and had turned my phone…
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A Q&A with Jennifer Browdy: As a comparatist, I was struck by how the theme of resistance resonated among women writers from different countries and backgrounds in Latin America and the Caribbean, including US Chicanas and Latinx. I wanted to create an anthology that would spark conversations among these women (and among readers) about the…
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By José Orduña: When I was ten my dad gave me my first wallet—it was green, with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the outside. Then he handed me my identification card, my first green card, which was actually pink. He said we’d gotten it when we’d gone to Juárez but that he didn’t think…
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By Michael Bérubé | In disability studies, we tend to be skeptical of the so-called “supercrip” and allergic to any suggestion that people with disabilities can be inspiring. But it really is quite difficult to go to a Special Olympics meet, of whatever size, and not be inspired by the passion of the athletes and…
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By Christian Coleman: There was one story Octavia E. Butler wouldn’t write. Reveling in science fiction/fantasy for an openness she saw lacking in other genres, Butler gave us gene-trading extraterrestrials, psionically powered mutants, a genetically engineered vampire, a reluctant time traveler forced to visit the brutal past of American slavery. But during her three-decades-long career…
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By Nicholas DiSabatino | Today marks the hundredth anniversary of legendary literary icon Gwendolyn Brooks. I’m so proud to be working on the new biography of her from award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist, Angela Jackson, who intimately knew Brooks and her family and had unprecedented access to her papers. A Surprised Queenhood in the New…
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By Rashod Ollison | When I realized I’d never jump in the sky and fly away like the mythical African slaves in that old folktale, which was also around the time I figured Michael Jackson would never come to the projects and take me away in a rocket limo, I begrudgingly accepted my sexuality. I…
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