Rumpus Original Fiction: Poor People Disappear
Nothing is not right. There is no indication there has ever been a house.
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Posts Tagged: diversity
Celebrating Eid in Trump’s America
It seems when our dialogue loses nuance, society in turn loses its mind.
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Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
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A Year in the Rumpus Matriarchy
I feel ready to double down on the promise of writing, on the power of sharing stories, and on our ability to build bridges with language and knock down walls with words.
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Slush Piles in White
The sensibilities of whiteness do not want us to work, do not want us to think, do not want us to imagine outside of its bounds.
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Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
In Thousand Star Hotel, the bilingual writer’s struggle with expressing himself in English becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s struggle with navigating the host nation’s hostile-yet-lucrative social terrain.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Nikki Wallschlaeger
Nikki Wallschlaeger discusses her new collection Crawlspace, why she chose to work with the sonnet form, and how segregation in American never ended.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Angie Thomas
Angie Thomas discusses her debut novel, The Hate U Give, landing an agent on Twitter, and why she trusts teenagers more than the publishing industry.
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Interrogating the English Language with Safiya Sinclair
To be forced to speak in the language of the colonist, the language of the oppressor, while also carrying within us the storm of Jamaican patois, we live under a constant hurricane of our doubleness.
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The Rumpus Interview with Erik Kennedy
Poet Erik Kennedy discusses literary community and his formative years as a young writer in New Jersey, and shares two new prose poems.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Melissa Yancy
Melissa Yancy discusses her debut story collection Dog Years, using her day job for inspiration, and being “an old curmudgeon at heart.”
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Multitudes: Policing Black Art
Editors and producers skin my art and wrap my entire face with it, asking me to write and read in Black face.
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Luke Cage: When Representation Isn’t Enough
This show’s true strength is its diverse portrayal of African-American subjectivity and morality, amongst both the male and female characters.
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The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay discusses her new collection, Difficult Women, the problem with whiteness as the default and the need for diverse representation, and life as a workaholic.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Best-selling author James Patterson is handing out bonuses to bookstore employees once again, celebrating the people who make best-selling authors possible. The Daily Beast has a roundup of some of the best independent bookstores across the country. As if you needed another reason to move to Canada, Toronto is getting five new bookstores.
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Damned and Damaged Vessels
I envisioned a new science fiction canon, one in which I was a cyborg, fashioning my body into something new.
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The Rumpus Interview with Gregory Pardlo
Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo discusses the reverence for poetry found in other cultures, how he strings a book together, and the future of American poetry in light of our national crisis.
...moreSaeed Jones Lights up Different Forms of Humanity
For Brooklyn Magazine, Molly McArdle profiles poet, essayist, and BuzzFeed Literary Editor Saeed Jones. McArdle solicits Jones’s thoughts on diversity in media and describes him as a “literary citizen” for his work with BuzzFeed’s Reader vertical and the Emerging Writers’ Fellowship program. Last but not least, Jones mentions one of his first published pieces was at The […]
...moreSelma Lagerlöf, an Exception to the Rule
Since the the first Nobel Prize was awarded, Cassie Gonzales explains in “An Unconventional Nobel Laureate” at the Ploughshares blog, the Laureate winner list has not been a bastion of diversity. However, Selma Lagerlöf was an exception—in her brief, funny essay, Gonzalez explains how a “disabled, Swedish, cross-genre, lady-loving author” bucked the white male (and heterosexual and able-bodied) […]
...moreAll Talk, No Action
Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, pens an essay for Lit Hub pointing out the meagerness of diversity as a meaningful end goal for creative communities. He critiques the repeated use of diversity panels, as they merely benchmark the fact that we have not even managed bring that small goal to fruition […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
The plot thickens: literary fiction may not affect empathy after all. China’s solution to producing entrepreneurs? Science fiction. Kids of all races prefer black and Latinx teachers to whites. Science says: everything you learned about sexuality is wrong. Take back dinosaurs from the children!
...moreReading YA Lit as an Act of Resistance
These and many other stories hope to remind us that the freedom to choose our own reading is a form of resistance against the looming threat of a totalitarian state… YA literature has situated itself as one of the most influential genres in publishing, with more adults reading YA than ever, and young adults being the most “literate” […]
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Podcatcher #5: #GoodMuslimBadMuslim
Podcatcher talks with Taz Ahmed and Zahra Noorbakhsh of #GoodMuslimBadMuslim about the podcast format, finding humor in absurdity, and diversity within the Muslim identity.
...moreTelling, Not Showing
As I processed a dominant Euro-American writing pedagogy from the perspective of an aspiring fiction writer and an immigrant critic of color, I couldn’t stop wondering: are we, in 21st-century America, overvaluing a sight-based approach to storytelling? And could this be another case of cultural particularity masquerading itself as universal taste? Namrata Poddar tries to […]
...moreDiversity for the Campus Novel
At Ploughshares, Bryan Washington explores the lack of racial diversity in the “campus novel” genre, where the students rebelling against their educational establishments are still overwhelmingly white.
...moreSharing Spaces
Many times the tone just simply says, “I do not feel you belong here.” Over at Saint Heron, Solange Knowles shares her experience of spending time in predominantly white spaces.
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Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
They’re there but not there. They’re included but their stories don’t fully weave into the story.
...moreBringing Diversity to the Comic Book Store World
Ariell Johnson, owner of Amalgam Comics and Coffeehouse in Philadelphia, is the East Coast’s first black female comic book store owner. For CNN, Ryan Bergeron talks with Johnson about opening up the geek world to young black girls, bringing comic authors of color to the forefront, and creating a welcoming space for comic lovers everywhere.
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Florence Foster Jenkins, Meryl Streep, and White Feminism
Streep’s career encapsulates the mid-to-late 20th century ideal of American whiteness as aspirational and as attainable.
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