Category: Culture
Rapture and Outcry: On Barry Jenkins’s Stirring If Beale Street Could Talk
by Cyrus Cassells | May 21, 2019 | CultureAs rapturously stylized and romantic as an urban Romeo and Juliet, streaked with social clashes and yearning, Barry Jenkins’s soulful adaptation of James Baldwin’s poignant 1970s novel If Beale Street Could Talk accomplishes so much with stirring music, color, and city-that-never-sleeps atmosphere that the film becomes an irresistible ballad of young black love and hardship. […]
Living Room
by Patricia Spears Jones | May 20, 2019 | PoetryPatricia Spears Jones is a Brooklyn-based African-American poet. Her most recent collection, A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s 2016 William Carlos Williams Prize, as well as for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her earlier books include Painkiller (Tia Chucha Press, 2010), Femme du Monde (Tia Chucha […]
A Concise Biography of Tyranny
by Ellen Hinsey | Apr 16, 2019 | PoetryEllen Hinsey is a Paris-based poet, translator, and political thinker in the tradition of Hannah Arendt. Her four books of poetry are Cities of Memory, a winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, The White Fire of Time, Update on the Descent, and The Illegal Age (2018), which explores themes of fascism and unraveling democracy. […]
Ocasio-Cortez Exploited as Clickbait and Outrage Porn Magnet
by Patricia Roberts-Miller | Apr 2, 2019 | MediaWe are now at the point where, if a second assistant to a dog-catcher in south-south-east Nowhere says something negative about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative from New York, it’s news. And if a Democrat criticizes her, it’s going to be all over Facebook. At any given moment, there are political figures saying critical things about other […]
Oklahoma
by Hala Alyan | Mar 14, 2019 | PoetryPalestinian-American author and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan has, at 32, already published four acclaimed books of poetry, as well as a novel, Salt Houses, which won the Arab American Book Award for fiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In depicting the roller-coaster ride of exile and nonstop adaptation to new worlds, the speaker in […]