There are a lot of sayings that amount to a kind of folk pragmatism: “Might makes right.” “God helps those who help themselves.” “The ends justify the means.” “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” These are all ways of saying if you’re getting the outcome you want, then don’t worry about how that […]

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Suzanne Gardinier is a global activist and author of several wide-ranging, dynamic poetry collections, including Iridium & Selected Poems 1986–2009 (2011), Today: 101 Ghazals (2008), and the long poem The New World (1993), which Lucille Clifton chose for the Associated Writing Program’s Award Series in Poetry. She has also published a collection of essays, A […]

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On this date in 2017, members of the alt-right, neo-Confederates, neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and various right-wing militias marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, carrying semi-automatic weapons and chanting racist and antisemitic slogans. Civil rights activist Heather Heyer was killed and dozens injured when a car driven by a white supremacist slammed into a crowd of […]

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Shane McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule (2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)—winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which bolsters an understanding of racism, and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times […]

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Intensely alive and topical, brimming with unfettered social critique and on-fire language, Evie Shockley’s work is pertinent, spirited, exhilarating poetry that sweeps us past sociopolitical despair, functioning as a fierce, loving bulwark against complacency and violence. Evie Shockley is the author of three books of poetry, including semiautomatic, a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize […]

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