Reading Baldwin after Harvey: Why Climate Change is a Social Justice Issue
Of course, the circumstances between Hurricane Harvey and the 1943 Harlem riots are different, but the fault lines exposed by those events are not.
Author: Daniel Peña
Acts of Listening: An Interview with Analicia Sotelo
Sotelo’s poems pull together the mythological and the mundane to synthesize a direct line of communication between the Greek mythological Ariadne and the various personae that inhabit these pages.
Writing From Exile
Regarding writing in exile within one’s own country, James Baldwin might facetiously ask, “Exiled from which America?” He might invoke W.E.B. Du Bois’ double-consciousness and say, “You should know you were only really a part of it insomuch as you could see out of your own eyes and perceive, at the same time, how they see you and not succumb to that vision.”
“Writing is its own country”: An Interview With Mark Haber
Mark Haber is perhaps one of the most influential yet low-key of tastemakers in the
book world. What Haber reads, people buy, because you know that when Haber recommends it,
it is the real deal.
T-Shirts, Deportation, and the Epiphanies of Clemens Meyer in Mexico City
What is new and what is vestigial? What trauma is passed down and what trauma can be left behind? While some might consider Texas a kind of photo negative of the former East Germany, I think of those two states as simulacrum in many ways.
The Country Inside Your Skin: Reading Old Rendering Plant in the Alamo City
The Alamo is a physical manifestation of Stasi-like doublespeak, a celebration of white mediocrity, white insularity, and the deep need to claim victory at all costs despite thorough defeat—a strategy for decentering truth not unlike the modus operandi of the Trump administration or its lackeys.
The Poetics of Directness in D. F. Brown’s Ghost of a Person Passing in Front of the Flag
The veneer that is language is a major recurring trope in D. F. Brown’s newest collection. What is real and what is imagined through the filter of language? How might that affect the way we process an event?
Trauma and Humanity in Lion Cross Point
Girding Masatsugu Ono’s novel is what seems to be a single question: Does family (or community) exist without trauma?
Inking Well: An Interview With Jasminne Mendez
If you’re at all alive in the Houston arts scene, chances are you’ve crossed paths with Jasminne Mendez in one of her capacities: as a poet, as an actor, as an educator, as a podcast host, or as a community organizer and programmer (sometimes all of these things in a single day).