Posts by author
Katie O’Brien
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Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Poetic Voice
All the poetry I have goes other places. It’s still with me. When I think about black lives, or the Black Panther comic, I’m thinking in a poetic sense. In an interview at The Poetry Foundation, Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses the…
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The Complicated “Riches” Of America
In a nuanced essay at Vela Magazine, Anne P. Beatty discusses what her experiences teaching for the Peace Corps in Nepal and teaching at an impoverished school in LA taught her about privilege and about America: Nepal seemed full of…
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Sci-Fi =/= Unrealistic
Tired of being met with condescension when she says she likes science fiction, Justina Ireland argues for science fiction’s importance in understanding very real contemporary issues faced by marginalized groups: By refusing to absorb those ideas, by considering them unrealistic,…
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LGBTQ Lives and the Prison System
At the New Yorker, Grace Dunham discusses the importance of Captive Genders, an anthology about the oft-forgotten impact of the prison industrial complex on trans and queer people, recently released in its second edition: The book brings together the work…
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Instagramming Motherhood
Vela Magazine’s always-funny Sarah Menkedick discusses her newfound relationship with Instagram as a mother, and posits photo-sharing as a powerful validation of domesticity: It creates scenes, story. More importantly, it asks for recognition and imbues meaning. It ushers the domestic out…
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It’s Literally Fine
At the Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance defends teenagers’ ever-maligned contributions to the lexicon, citing a recent student that examines the extent to which teens influence linguistic change: And the thing about linguistic changes is they can’t exactly be stopped in any…
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Visible Only in Literature
From Cinderella and Oliver Twist to Anne of Green Gables and Harry Potter, Etan Smallman muses on the paradox of why so many of literature’s most celebrated protagonists are orphans: Many of the most powerful characters in our best-loved stories…
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What Pregnant Women Read
At Lit Hub, Yardenne Greenspan discusses the solace she found in parenting books during pregnancy: Now that I was in this completely new and foreign scenario, my body doing things I never realized it knew how, my mind trying to…
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A Writer’s Vision
James Tate Hill, author of the recently released Academy Gothic, details his experience as “a writer who can’t read” due to visual impairment: My preoccupation with the charade of passing, that it mattered to me at all, strikes me now as…
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Writers for Human Rights
Hundreds of writers around the world are protesting Saudi Arabia’s death sentence of Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh, accused of promoting atheism in his 2008 book of poetry Instructions Within. As a show of solidarity with the poet, Fayadh’s poetry will be…
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For Men and By Men
Slate’s Rebecca Onion and Andrew Kahn analyze the overwhelming maleness of both the subjects and authors of history books, discussing their findings with book publishers: Our data set revealed some answers about the publishing of popular history that we expected:…
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The Literary Deadly Sins
For the New York Times‘s Bookends column, Rivka Galchen and Benjamin Moser muse on the question of which transgressions in literature are unforgivable: For me, the unforgivable sin in literature is the same as that in life: the assumption of certainty…