circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when they walked. I wanted dancing...
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The Black Girl At Your Party
circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when they walked. I wanted dancing...
Rubinstein’s Chopin
This inch-thick, square box was familiar from my childhood: the sturdy, waxy cardboard, its paper cover glued onto the top of the album set like a fifth-grader’s découpage. I used to open these boxes like gifts, lifting off the lid to reveal the...
Fundraising for Planned Parenthood
I ski for them—the nurses and doctors who save women like me from back alley butchers and the ungainly pace of ignorance each slog uphill on skinny boards a penance for the grudge that grew along with the human in my belly,| who owes his life to a...
Dear Miss Metropolitan: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell
In 1996, a teenage Black girl disappears from the streets of Queens. Then another. Then a third girl, of Puerto Rican descent, steps into the street and isn’t seen again. The disappearance of these three girls doesn’t stop the world or make...
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The Black Girl At Your Party
circa 1970s My plaits and ribbons brightened white spaces for a long time Fat immigrant ribbons in every Color held my Thick Jamaican hair American black girls didn’t wear fat ribbons They had beads that made music when they walked. I wanted dancing...
Rubinstein’s Chopin
This inch-thick, square box was familiar from my childhood: the sturdy, waxy cardboard, its paper cover glued onto the top of the album set like a fifth-grader’s découpage. I used to open these boxes like gifts, lifting off the lid to reveal the...
Fundraising for Planned Parenthood
I ski for them—the nurses and doctors who save women like me from back alley butchers and the ungainly pace of ignorance each slog uphill on skinny boards a penance for the grudge that grew along with the human in my belly,| who owes his life to a...
Dear Miss Metropolitan: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell
In 1996, a teenage Black girl disappears from the streets of Queens. Then another. Then a third girl, of Puerto Rican descent, steps into the street and isn’t seen again. The disappearance of these three girls doesn’t stop the world or make...
From Afar (Translated by Siavash Saadlou)
*This piece was translated by Siavash Saadlou Then she fell in love. Out of the blue. In the thick of final exams, when the spring and the peals of adolescence become one, making you feel as if you were constantly teetering along the edge of a...
The Pittsburgh Massacre and its Aftermath: A Witness to the Witnesses
Whenever I’m struggling to enter deeply into the mind of a fictional character, I’ll ask myself: What is it that this character doesn’t want to know about him or herself? What feeling is she keeping at a distance or trying to avoid? Those thoughts...
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