identity
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The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
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Notes from a Former Ghost
Once there was a little parrot and she carried one drop of water at a time in a leaf she held in her beak. I forget who she was carrying the water to.
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Unsettled Terrain: Rummage by Ife-Chudeni A. Oputa
If shame works by convincing us that we are bad, by pinning us into a definition of badness, then the poems in Rummage resist by refusing to be pinned at all.
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Identity Theft
In the past year, the writing process has become, for me, a way to navigate between the present and the past, between what I have access to and what I will never know.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Morgan Jerkins
Morgan Jerkins discusses This Will Be My Undoing, getting her start on the Internet, and why her collection of linked personal essays isn’t just another Millennial read.
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Sound & Vision: Celia C. Pérez
Allyson McCabe talks with Celia C. Pérez about her debut middle-grade novel, The First Rule of Punk, her inspirations for writing the book, and her own childhood.
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The Woman Behind the Curtain Pulling the Levers: Talking with Zinzi Clemmons
Zinzi Clemmons on What We Lose, representations of blackness, and life’s influences on writing.
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Bodies Testing Boundaries: The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld
The Worlds We Think We Know by Dalia Rosenfeld is a profound debut that carefully undermines the foundational assumptions we have about other people.
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Navigating Empathy: Camille T. Dungy’s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
Luckily for us, Dungy’s increase in empathy and experience coincides with her embrace of the braided essay: her thinking crashes people, places, and ideas against each other in unexpected and adventurous ways.
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Color Is a Language in Itself: Mahtem Shiferraw Discusses Fuchsia
Mahtem Shiferraw discusses her debut collection, Fuchsia, how she uses color to understand the world and to communicate, and why her work continually addresses displacement.
