Photo Essay
“In the most core-shaking moments of my life, I learned to return to these places to move beyond this physical form and ground my spiritual self.” Self-portraiture is the way I navigate myself back to my body. For years, my body did not feel like it belonged to me until I started photographing myself in »
“For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” —1 Chronicles 29:15 The Hebrew word translated as “sojourner” in the King James Bible has no exact equivalent in English. While for us the concept of a sojourn »
“Habitual return highlights the importance of maintaining cultural practices and history between generations to anchor one’s identity and sense of self.” Helen canned peaches, sewed and patched quilts, and prepped her children for a cross-country trek. Her husband, J. L., had set out months ago with her brothers, joining the steady flow of people leaving »
“Freedom of mobility, accessibility of housing for one night or many, and a safe and secure environment for the many ways young Black women needed to spend their days—that was the point.” One late August night in 1943, Robbie Shields traveled up from Woodlawn in the South Side to Chicago’s northern suburb of Evanston for »
Sometimes you can prepare for a sojourn. Plan your route. Gather resources. Train your breathing. Maybe you will visualize your success. Chant the names you will need to remember. Pray for strength. Some of us write a list of days. Notify our loved ones. Give away our excess. But what you cannot know at the »
The stories of the Black South are infinite. We hear them in music. We read them in literature. They move with and through us in dance. When I consider the practice of Letitia Huckaby, I know too that our stories manifest themselves in the photograph. Using photographs as objects to be manipulated, Huckaby stitches together »
Less than an hour from Southwest Florida’s highly coveted coastlines and palm tree-adorned roadways lies Immokalee, a rural town where a multibillion-dollar agricultural industry booms. Immokalee is home to approximately twenty-seven thousand residents, who compose the immigrant farmworker population of Southwest Florida, including people from Guatemala, Haiti, and Mexico. This community from the Global South »
In the north Georgia highlands, as the nights were falling earlier and colder, eight young siblings huddled outside a small, run-down cabin. It was 1945. Their mother and grandfather had recently moved the children there with no warning or explanation and alarmingly few provisions. The kids were scared, for good reason, wondering why their mother »
Food
Misshapen paleozoic fish, atavist, tired of climbing the evolutionary ladder and waiting for a thumb or feet or the ability to breathe on land, one year you just stepped off and let the others pass you by . . . And do you ever wonder?—That is, what if you had climbed all the way to the »
Poetry
Our parents stayed during the civil war.Don’t say we escaped, just that we too failed.We left Beirut on the verge of collapse& revolution. That clearing of hope,where would we be without it? Ask Ziad,who put the city on a stage & laughedat its slow ways of killing us with pillsor memory. So many of us »
Essay
“The right to vote remains the most essential key to freedom and choice in all aspects of our lives.” As we move through these fraught days in America, watching with horror the incomprehensible destruction and death in Israel, Gaza, and Ukraine, I ponder if we are living in more historic, troubling times than generations before »
Essay
“The current iteration of voter suppression that has swept across the South has been met by renewed organizing efforts that remain determined to fully restore the Voting Rights Act and secure the promise of democracy.” The South has often served as the crucible for democracy, and in recent years, the COVID pandemic, new voting restrictions, »