Scarlet

    A story in parts   A list of things I thought of and had to restrain myself from doing before my grandmother’s funeral Pack shorts and sneakers and a hoodie and my my BLACKLIVESMATTER bracelet and a book into a survival pack because she said ​It’s 2017, come as you are​ and I […]

    What does genre mean to you and how does it build/unbuild your work?         Lauren Russell is the author of What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta, 2017). She was the 2014-2015 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the 2016 VIDA Fellow to

occasional elements and bodies they make   Sunlight, consequence of sun, wakes me. Sweeps slow, roams my skin, my down of hair, the dawn, rising. Spring mornings, graceful, breaking. Waking, consequence of sleep—sleep of waking. Today i may do many things, some intentionally, softly, with care, others habitual, thoughtless. The era asks little but that

    Pluto   If we were starfish (who can regenerate limbs), what would trauma be? A limb lost. And still we would be two of us, would become many from the breaking off of one. Here’s the central disc: have you known yourself to split in                

      What does genre mean to you and how does it build/unbuild your work?   If genre is anything like law, circumscribed and reinforced by social belief in their sanctity, then I believe we have an obligation to make it useful to us while also knowing how to strategically transgress it. People like

I wanted to belong — but I didn’t want to dress like everyone else. Down Eastern Avenue, I passed television repair shops thick with dust; pawnshops, biker bars; a Taco Bell. In 1990s southeast Los Angeles, this is what people wore: teased bangs; discount jeans; T-shirts with kittens and phrases in puffy letters: “Someone in

I want to write about tierra, which means soil or earth to my people, maybe dirt, or land, which, in turn, means something very precise and precious. By writing, I tell the world I am a brown man. Where I am from. What I am. Not boxes to mark some form, but blood knowledge, what

Every year it was the same. The then Milwaukee Sentinel printed the pictures of all their summer interns who worked at the paper. The pictures were divided into two categories: Interns Minority Interns Each year, my picture, with the worst lighting imaginable, was displayed under the minority banner. I hated that term: minority intern. It

Several years ago during my first semester in graduate school, some of my classmates and I went out to a local watering hole after a rather tedious writing workshop. Which, by the way, was nothing new. I found my graduate writing workshops consistently difficult, not because I couldn’t take critique, but the focus of the

Disclaimer One: The intended audience for this talk is mainly white writers, so I use the dreaded royal ‘We’. I understand none of the We in this room are a monolith, but pronouns save time—and time is short. Disclaimer Two: While these remarks focus on race specifically, many of the same or similar points could