A few weeks ago, a rejection email popped into my inbox. That’s not exactly unusual; dealing with a constant stream of rejections (punctuated, happily, with...
Archive for tag: identity
Voices of Bettering American Poetry 2015 — Christopher Soto
How do you practice self-care when writing about difficult subject matter? I try not to force myself into retraumatization when writing. I don’t think it’s...
Voices of Bettering American Poetry 2015 — Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
What advice do you have for young and emerging writers, particularly of marginalized identities? What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? I think the best...
VIDA Editor Roundtable
Sarah Fawn: Hi everyone, Sarah Fawn Montgomery here. Thank you all for (virtually) sitting down to talk about our editing experiences and processes, and to...
Building Community: On the Power of Women Mentors
At 17 years old, I kept what I imagined was a riveting journal of high school life. It was rife with rowdy, drunken kisses tasting...
Fighting Against Ghosthood
“I met History once,” the St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott said in his sprawling poem “Schooner Flight,” “but he ain’t recognize me.” As a transgender...
The Unbearable (White) Maleness of US Poetry: And How We Can Enable a Structural Response to Literary Yellowface and Gender Inequity in Publishing
On Labor Day, news broke widely that White writer Michael Derrick Hudson’s poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” is...
Report from the Field: The Other Section
I attempt to practice a feminism rooted essentially in intersectionality. As a woman who has had the privilege of studying feminist theory that illuminates the...
Finding Home Through Literature: A Study of Filipino Fiction
All my life, I felt ashamed because I was born in America. Growing up in Los Angeles, CA, in the nineties, an American, to me,...
Report from the Field: To Lift Off My Veil
When I began considering Anne Sexton, the American poet who could not bear the sexism of the mid-20th century Western world, and read in her...