Nancy Chen Long’s poem “Reverberation” fights back against silence and erasure. The poem’s title points toward the resonance of sound, and this is exactly what Chen Long’s words do: even in stillness the music of her language ripples across the page.
Spider Love Song and Other Stories by Nancy Au is a short-story collection about stories—how narratives can be used to construct and deconstruct lived realities.
I was first drawn to Taneum Bambrick’s full-length debut Vantage (Copper Canyon, 2019) because it had “an ecological eye,” but after reading the collection, I realize how much of a disservice it is to characterize this book solely as environmentally urgent.
My family feared white people. White people, after all, danced on our newly paved driveway, leaving gym-shoe footprints. White people threw rocks and rotten eggs at our windows. White people stole my family’s first big purchase, a ’72 Thunderbird that was found two months later—stripped—in a steakhouse parking lot off Cicero Avenue. White people were …
I noted that I’d been writing the stories I wanted, kind of, but I’d also been including other people’s ideas of blackness. I started writing stories that contradicted some folks’s view of blackness but felt true to my actual world and my created ones.
We’d like to recognize our editorial assistants, the volunteer readers who contribute their time and cognitive energies to our literary endeavor, without payment. We’d also like to share some of the kinds of comments that happen throughout the reading process