writers of color
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When White Saviors Create Literary Journals
Hey! We’re white! And we all voted for Obama! Twice! We should do something to help the literary downtrodden. American literature is already frustrating enough with publishing sorely lacking in diversity. But things can be even worse when the white-dominated industry…
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Heal Together
The Internet may have irreversibly altered the forms activism takes, but there is still room for change. Christopher Soto reflects on activist frameworks used in 2015 and offers their strategies for working toward a more inclusive poetry community in the…
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The Conversation: Jayson Smith and A. H. Jerriod Avant
My responsibility is to not be negligent and cause unnecessary harm. To a listener or reader. My allegiance is only to truth.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Vivian Lee
As an editor of color, one advantage I have is that writers of color are comfortable knowing I’m not asking for edits to artificially enhance or to cover up their race. It’s not weird to me that their characters look…
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The Conversation: Joshua Bennett and Camonghne Felix
What scares me in the current work is how much I trust the concept, what I’m trying to achieve.
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The Conversation: Jeremy Clark and Thiahera Nurse
I’m thinking about the difference between “I stay somewhere” and “I live somewhere.”
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kaitlyn Greenidge
Kaitlyn Greenidge discusses her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, siblinghood and sisterhood, and finding a group to call “my people” in the larger literary world.
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A Crucial Conversation with the Self
For a black woman in a white world, a conversation with the self is crucial: for when she walks through that often-unwelcoming world she is subjected to confining perceptions of who she might be. When that world insists on racist…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: A Roundtable on Writing, Editing, and Race
With Lisa Factora-Borchers, Patrice Gopo, Jennifer Niesslein, Tamiko Nimura, and Deesha Philyaw.
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A Writer’s Labels
The problem, however, lies in the fact that, whenever these labels are internalized by those in positions of power, they flatten a writer’s experiences. They shrink someone to just a sliver of his or her identity. Brandon Tensley writes for…