“Learn the numbers, // social security number, alien-card number, / street number, none of them mean to explain // this, this thing we have brought with ourselves,” from “Fire,” by Mahtem Shifferaw
In his recent essay collection Rumeurs d’Amérique (2020), Congolese-born writer Alain Mabanckou surveys LA from the balcony of his apartment while also looking east to the United States, France, the DRC, and beyond.
Karlos K. Hill interviews UCLA sociologist and Black Studies professor Marcus Anthony Hunter, who has has produced a manifesto for the burgeoning movement calling for reparations.
it’s the first time in weeks i’ve been / able to stay all day on my feet & this / makes me want to say yes & keep / saying it,” from “First Warm Sunday of the Year,” by Safia Elhillo
“you dance / because your bellies are empty . . . / that’s how you fight loneliness & the biting economic meltdown . . . / you men with villages of wives,” from “the dance,” by Vonani Bila
This erasured handmade map was crafted through and over Samuel Penniman Bates’s chapter on the 25th United States Colored Regiment in his History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (first published in 1869).
Leila’s Dream
“Death by literature”? Despite her fatal diagnosis, Leila Ross clung to reading till the very end.
Goodbye to Everything and Everybody
Naomi Shihab Nye recalls the “precious tender threadbare glory of each day” she experienced as a child who was not in a hurry to grow up.
In his plea for the planet, in which “humans understand themselves as a harmonious part of the Earth, neither more nor less than other animals, plants, and rocks,” Spanish writer Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga advocates a new geo-humanism that restores nature to the center.
The author’s childhood ended, more or less, on the beach of Vung Tau, Vietnam, “where magic and prayers failed.” In this lyric essay, he returns to the scene as a double refugee—in person and in memory.
“Han Kang’s literature is a genre in its own right. In fact, she was a poet before she became a novelist. The literary trail she has followed is characterized by a tenacious poetic language composed of all-white bones blasting the past. ”
Historic Black Santa Monica: A Conversation with Leana Brunson-McClain
Karlos K. Hill interviews Leana Brunson-McClain, who reflects on the vibrant Santa Monica Black community that was and her efforts to preserve its fading memory.
Reparations, Restitution, and Restorative Justice in Palm Springs: A Conversation with Areva Martin
Karlos K. Hill interviews Areva Martin, a nationally recognized civil rights attorney who helped to secure a $27 million decision to be used in addressing the historic wrongs to harmed residents of Palm Springs and their descendants.