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…
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Katie O'Brien
142 posts
Katie O'Brien is an English major at Cornell University, where she writes for kitsch magazine, DJs for a rock station, and complains about the cold. Find her on Twitter @abluekite.
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…