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Lessons Learned from a Self-Plagiarist
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. Clearly, I needed help. That’s why I picked up Imagine: How Creativity...
Pilgrims at the Plantation
“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. (Thanks, Disney+.)There’s little new left to observe about the...
REVELATIONS in Isolation
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. Luckily, I live with a parent who is a writer, poet, and voracious reader. Her...
Why A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions” Is the Only Hip-Hop Song You Need
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...
Young, Black, and Magical: The Renaissance of YA Afrofuturism and Speculative Fiction
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...
To Feel Them Full: Reading Empathy in Keats
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...
Who Do You Serve When You Serve Yourself? Consumer Labor, Automation, and a Century of Self-Service
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...
Long Surnames and Pride: On Alma and How She Got Her Name
Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela thinks her name is too long. When it doesn’t fit on a single sheet of paper, she tapes paper scraps onto the edges to make it fit. Alma then begins to question her place in the world, her name becoming a metonym for Latinx...
Seeing Minds Through Minds: Determining Whose Perception to Trust in Sense and Sensibility
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...
Publishing in Academia: Reflectionsfrom a ’24th Grader’
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...
UnBreakable Bonds: Literary Ecosystems in Africa
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...
Spanish is Not a Foreign Language: Publishing and National Identity
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...