Mensah Demary
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What to Read When: A Holiday Book-Gifting Guide
Rumpus editors share their favorite books to gift to friends and family!
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What to Read When You Are Searching for Community
Contributors to A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY share reading recommendations.
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Notable NYC: 5/6–5/12
Saturday 5/6: Jennifer E. Smith presents Windfall. McNally Jackson Books, 6 p.m., free. Carmen Giménez Smith and Aldrin Valdez join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5.
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Next Letter in the Mail: Mensah Demary
Our next Letter in the Mail comes from Mensah Demary! Mensah writes about not surrendering hope, but instead clinging to it to remain sane in these anxiety-filled times. “There is no human endeavor without hope. Even as I write, I hope…
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The Rumpus Interview with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his story collection Insurrections, father relationships, hip-hop, knowing when to abandon a project, and choosing not to workshop certain stories.
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A Language Only We Can Hear
Kendrick Lamar’s debut album “Good Kid, M.A.D.D. City” contains the basic, essential elements of a novel: a protagonist faced with an antagonistic outer world, plot and its arc—from opening scene to crisis to climax on down to denouement, a narrative…
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The Literary Value of Hip-Hop
At Electric Literature, Mensah Demary argues that there should be greater appreciation of hip-hop as a powerful storytelling medium, positing Nas as a master of literary narrative: If presented with a choice, I’d rather discuss classic hip-hop albums than short…
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age.
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Change, but Not Too Much
Mensah Demary caps off the year at Catapult with an essay that reflects on the traditional New Year’s resolution and what our easy dismissing of these attempts to change says about us: I should probably write a few words about…
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How to Become
Mensah Demary, Associate Web Editor for the new and exciting online literary outlet Catapult, shares his story of how he got to be where he is through a series of hilarious and depressing montages, with an overarching theme worth internalizing: “I don’t…
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The Great American Tweeter
Reading Literary Twitter is to witness brief, terse glimpses into the writerly psyche, and how insecure and unsure and thin-skinned we tend to be. As writers, we want to be validated. We want to matter. The published stories and poems…
