essays

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, who had been forcibly conscripted by a regional caudillo — a strongman who rules by force and a cult of...

While accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2014, 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...

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. Published by Verso during the early peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in April, the work is a type of manifesto...

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. Novels like Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star (2016), Nic Stone’s Dear Martin (2017), Angie...

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. As a reader, I will admit to...

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, or withdraw $40 from an ATM, you understand the procedure. The logic and technologies of self-service...

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. Far from burying the genre, the project...

The Dashwood sisters are on the verge of a crisis. They are young, single, fatherless, and fortuneless; marriage is their only method of attaining financial and personal stability. But the kind of partnerships Elinor and Marianne Dashwood pursue, and the marriages...

I remember my thoughts as I walked into the book exhibit at a conference in London last summer: “Can I just snuggle amongst all the books?” That may sound a little ridiculous, but I’ve always loved being in settings where I could learn and read, particularly libraries...

The 2019 theme for the Writivism Literary Festival in Kampala, Uganda—“UnBreakable Bonds” —began with a question: what does it mean to be a prize competition, and by extension a publisher, only open to writers living on the African continent? Beneath this question are...

In 2018, the Latinx population in the United States reached 59.9 million.[1] Given the current climate of fear and uncertainty created by the policies of the Trump administration toward immigrant families as well as historical attitudes toward Latin American...

It’s early morning in Los Angeles as I walk a side street to a coffee shop to work on a revision of this essay. I’m listening to the audio version of the article “An Epidemic of Disbelief,” a story unearthing the patterns of institutional negligence by the police...