Front Porch
by Regina N. Bradley
I always talk about the paternal side of my family—Nana Boo, Paw Paw, Daddy ’nem—but rarely share about my maternal southern roots. Mommy’s side of the family is a mystery wrapped up in a legend that eggs on my curiosity ’bout where my Mommy’s people ’nem from. On her side, I got different types of »
Essay
Archives, Family History, and Black Southern Migration to Chicago
by Sumayya Ahmed
“By searching for the archival traces of my family’s pre- and early migration life, I become my family’s historian, putting primary sources in conversation with family lore and oral histories.” In summer of 2020, the Alabama State Archives issued a statement acknowledging its role in upholding systematic racism by, among other things, putting into practice »
Essay
Two Historical Blueprints
by Ben Wise
“The historical pattern is clear: Political interference with the mission of the university has the power to shape the faculty population, influence campus culture, and ruin individual lives.” The university classroom is a recurring setting in the theatre of the American reactionary imagination. For those possessed of nightmarish and creative minds, the classroom is a »
Memoir
by Michael McFee
“Jimmy Carter was a paradox, my favorite kind of person. He was a human being being human, and owning it.” One drizzly Tuesday night in Chapel Hill—April Fool’s Day, 1975—my girlfriend and I were studying in the student union at the University of North Carolina. We’d found a vacant room then shut the door, spreading out books and »
Photography
by Josh Aronson
For the past five years, Florida has been my studio and my muse. It is something I’ve been circling, leaving, returning to, and trying to understand. I moved here from Canada when I was three, and I grew up with that strange double feeling. I was an insider because I was raised in the Sunshine »
Memoir
My Family’s Gay Hairdresser
by Harry Thomas Jr.
“Me-at-seventeen badly needed a queer mentor, someone who could open the gate to the gay world and give me a tour, answer my questions.” Hearing the line that will stay in my head for weeks and years and decades to come goes like this: I am fourteen or fifteen or maybe even sixteen. I am »
credit: Josh Aronson
Essay
Lincoln Beach and the Struggle over Black Public Space
by Shruti Gautam
“In preserving Lincoln Beach’s memory, New Orleanians also envisioned a future in which Black leisure would have a place to thrive.” In the summer of 2023, I followed behind families toting floaties and foam coolers, trudging up an incline on the side of a levee. As I fumbled over a fence and down a ladder, »
Essay
Climate Change, System Collapse, and Home in New Orleans
by Shannon Dosemagen
“New Orleans is a weather city. Our relationship to the atmosphere is daily, immediate, visceral.” Home is identity and inheritance, memory and continuity, and a place where intellectual knowledge and emotional allegiance often collide without resolution. In a city like New Orleans, home perhaps takes on a denser meaning because of the interwoven social structures »
Poetry
by James Daniels
“Everybody I love / is dead or wants to be.”
