ESSAYS
By Alexander Billet: Algiers are, unmistakably, a band well-acquainted with late capitalism’s structure of feeling….
By Arielle Stambler: Literary study offers an opportunity to suspend disbelief, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it could be…
By Shweta Deshpande: Cambodia is the land of Angkor Wat, a World Heritage Site more widely known than the country itself….
By Jeanny F. Fuentes: The virtual archival exhibit Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age, curated by Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez…
By Julissa Guerrero Iniguez: Euphoria debuted on HBO in 2019, meeting with almost universal critical acclaim. The show is a teen drama that explicitly confronts controversial subjects…
By Kersti Francis: When and how do we talk about the attitudes of an entire field? These conversations often occur in office hours, not in articles, emerging over drinks at conferences…
By Manon Hakem-Lemaire: “He’s Mexican,” I told my French mom about my boyfriend. “Oh, does he have a mustache and a sombrero?” she replied, amused. After months spent in Mexico, mostly among the Jewish community…
By Illianna Gonzalez-Soto: The most profound lesson I have learned reading literature is that words are powerful: relating your narrative can change the world…
By Anthony Karambelas: This past year, writer’s block hit me more acutely than ever. Time I had blocked off to write became day-long reading sprees and, when that felt too mentally taxing, hours of binge watching….
By Ruddy Lopez: Throughout my adulthood, curanderas have said that my grandmother watches over me. I knew this was true when my mother came back from a visit to Mexico five years ago. She opened her suitcase…
By Marissa Mika: For years, we had cats. Gigantic rescue cats, retrieved from a Philadelphia parking lot when they were only a pair of gray and black kittens, as benign and rambunctious as the cubs in Tiger King…
By Kelly Alblinger: Life lessons have the tendency to sneak up on us. Often, we’re going about our business, doing what we do, and a message from the universe smacks us upside the head without warning….
By Derek O’Leary: “The moment you’ve been waiting for!” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Aaron Burr announces in Act I of Hamilton. “The pride of Mount Vernon: George Washington,” who stomps, stern and capable, onto the stage….
By Olivia E. Joyce: In late March, faced with the new shelter-in-place order and only a faint understanding of the damage COVID-19 was to bring, I turned to my mother’s bookcase for a chance to escape….
By Madison Felman-Panagotacos: Deolinda Correa trudged across the arid Cuyo Valley in search of her husband, her infant son in tow. While her initial goal was the pursuit of her husband…
By Ksenia Firsova: Ursula K. Le Guin called for science-fiction writers to use their power of imagination to envision a world no longer constricted by the inherent inequalities and exploitative nature of capitalism….
By Jacob Soule: Some books are published at the wrong time. Richard Sennett’s and Pablo Sendra’s Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruption in the City is one such book….
By Adam Love: Amorn Thongpayong (อมร ทองพยงค์) is an award-winning Thai visual artist who explores themes of place, transition, history, tradition, and memory…
By Mary Huber: When you read a lot of poetry, people tend to assume that you have grasped something ineffable. They might remark that you are a sensitive and empathetic person because you have spent so much of your life in the minds of others…
By Kaitlyn Lindgren-Hansen: Even in the best of times, graduate students occupy a precarious position in higher education. But with many universities failing to offer clear directives for what instruction will look like for the upcoming fall semester…
By Mackenzie Weeks Mahoney: We rarely need to ask what “self-service” means. When you fill up your gas tank on the way to work, or surreptitiously mix Coke with horchata at the soda fountain…
By Daniel Dominguez: On June 19, 2020, producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed teamed up with the legendary jazz musician Roy Ayers to release Roy Ayers JID002, the second installment of their provocatively titled Jazz Is Dead series….
By Charlotte Taylor: In the late 2010s, an explosion of young adult (YA) novels by Black women flooded through a previously White-dominated sphere, topping publisher lists week after week…
CREATIVE WORK
By Lillian Lu:
you see, I wouldn’t call myself a poet/
as I have not thought poetically in some time/
like a flower is petals, stem, and powder…
By Bassam Sidiki:
Daud Nabi greeted the refugees/
from far-flung places in the Middle East/
who landed in Christchurch/
but that salutation/
also graced the gleaming barrel…
By Anthony Karambelas: Clark heard the car six seconds before it popped into view. The noise was dull. Just a low thud like a garbage truck. But that was the way it was: duller on the inside, and always felt more than heard…
By shah noor hussein:
How do I write all that I want to write while reading all that I must read while simultaneously attempting to make sense of it all?…
By Asesina Hudson: It was not without unpleasantness that I answered the first phone call from a tabloid. They wanted to know what I remembered about the incident. I said, “Things are still a little hazy.”…
By Brendan Riley: My mother was sick, “sick unto death,” as Poe wrote. With my beleaguered father unable to work as an accountant and look after me and my six siblings, my mother asked her older sister Roxanne, a more patient and practical soul…
By Luz Jiménez Ruvalcaba:
he is my father’s son —
my father, in the name of tall horses/
snake killer
my father, in the name of lavender doves/
opossum killer…
By Jessie Stoolman:
In exile, she makes neighbors out of strangers,/
Communities out of families,
New life out of old enmities –
Us, essentially….
By Carissa McQueen: The buzz of the world enters her dream before she knows she’s waking up. A low flying police helicopter. The irregular cadence of a leaf-blower….
By Bryce Becker:
That dirty smell
that rises off my skin
as the hot
water
hits
is a smell…
By Justine Yan:
For hours and hours
we are
have been
will be
driving down the Interstate 5—
By Kristen Simental: Nina Salas was six years old when she was branded unpatriotic by school officials. The frazzled principal Mr. Kirk, her matronly first-grade teacher Mrs. Clayton, and the grouchy secretary at the front desk all agreed: Nina was unpatriotic….
By Anny L. Mogollón:
General population
But you’re not.
Not anymore
Now you are an inmate of the state of California/
A transformation…
VISUAL ART
