What is our responsibility as artists to reinvent or reimagine our world, our selves, our work in order to dismantle current systems and conventions and tastes that are at best, dated and stifling, and at worst a threat to real, lived lives? What role does re-imagination play in freedom?
Sometimes the name and the body stop serving one another. It has been ineffective to always have to explain what this journal wasn’t (about JF, for instance) before we could say what we were. It is far too easy to distract oneself with the symptom instead of the problems rooted in the system at play.
Dear James, I wrote this all in cat memes cuz I didn’t want anything to get missed.
He had that look to him. That swish…This was a space he targeted bc they dared welcome in his otherness Continue reading
She Called it “White Woman Shit” On the morning of August 8th, I clicked on an Electric Literature essay that showed up on my FB timeline. The essay was written by a white woman who was attempting to own how she was complicit when confronted with racism. Imagine my surprise when I saw an … Continue reading
One of our jobs as writers concerned with social justice will be protecting the rights of individuals to criticize and question institutions and their practices. A failure to do so will mean real suffering for the most vulnerable members of society. Continue reading
Quenton Baker is a poet and educator from Seattle. His current focus is the fact of blackness in American society. He is a 2015-16 Made at Hugo House fellow and a two -time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is the author of This Glittering Republic (2016, Willow Books). Continue reading
i want a do-over/a do-new Continue reading
Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence (Anchor & Plume) and the forthcoming books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (ELJ Publications). He has been … Continue reading
here are some ways i’ve been trying 2 read & make & read & make: Continue reading
Nothing I write can make a white, womyn-born-womyn accept a trans lesbian of color, nor force a bigoted family to offer a decent Christmas to their queer child. Nothing I write will stop the rage of a bully who thinks trans women like me should die. Nothing I write will block the bullets flying in an Orlando nightclub. My best writing can’t even stop a Texas school from keeping a child out of the bathroom.
At this point, I am so tempted to protest, “until it does.” Continue reading
the times cut their tails & will you recognize the sky when your eyes are closed Continue reading
all of our ancestor’s/memories have already/been tattooed in our DNA/like the want for water,/the desire for a future/we are afraid to experience Continue reading
The James Franco Review 