The Shape of Nations
One cannot simply outgrow or outlive a colonial, racist history. In order for the system to change, we need to stare at it and acknowledge it for what it is.
Blog
Translating Genderqueerness
Genderqueerness is futuristic at its core, which is why you’ll come across many genderqueer characters in speculative fiction. But translation creates friction: gender identities meant to be ambiguous or kept secret until the reveal of an unexpected twist come up against other linguistic systems, as well as translators’ preconceptions.
Reclamation of Authority in Heretic: An Interview with Jeanna Kadlec
In Heretic, Jeanna Kadlec writes a devastatingly thorough critique of evangelicalism as she records her spiritual journey out of fear and into reclaiming authority over her own life.
Attention in Every Day We Get More Illegal
Juan Felipe Herrera’s 2020 poetry collection suggests that to sustain the kind of attention that leads to embodied care, to structural justice and community support, we will need both rage and dancing, ranting indictments and ancestral wisdom. Outrage and tenderness are not competing forces but mutually sustaining.
Reading Know My Name and Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
New memoirs by Chanel Miller and Jeannie Vanasco are about their rapes, but also about what it means to move through this world in a woman’s body. What has happened to Miller’s body and to Vanasco’s body connects them with millions of women globally and across time.
Igbo Wisdom in God of Mercy
Okezie Nwọka’s debut novel continues a powerful literary lineage of works representing Igbo resistance to colonial pressures. Nwoka’s book focuses on the tradition itself, treating it not as a fatally flawed or romanticized stable inheritance, but a living system that is not beyond change.
Robots Like a Greek Chorus
Poets are grappling with their anxieties over the future of artificial intelligence; with their awe at technological innovation; with their fumbling through the knowledge that, in pockets and backpacks, one carries with them a computer’s long-term memory—infallible and encyclopedic, unlike ours.
Art that Makes Us See
Cookie Mueller’s work bends the rules of craft. It would be easy to say that she skims above the surface, providing the sort of tales you’d hear after hours in a smoky bar.
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.