On Gaza’s beach, a young girl kneels beside a sand turtle she shaped with her hands and decorated with seashells. All photographs by Shams Mazen Rajab.

Every day, thousands of children wake in tents instead of homes, stand in lines for water instead of classrooms. Play has become a rare luxury, and education has turned into an act of resistance. This is not a passing crisis—it is an ongoing theft of an entire generation’s dreams.

In a small tent in Deir al-Balah, my thirteen-year-old sister Dima balances a notebook on her knees while my eleven-year-old sister Malak leans closer to listen. My seven-year-old brother Mohammad waits impatiently for his turn to recite the alphabet. This is not a classroom but a shelter, surrounded by the noise of aid trucks and queues for water. Childhood here has been stolen, replaced by survival.

My siblings spend long hours in lines instead of classrooms. They invent games from broken objects. My mother, once a teacher at home, has turned into a teacher in our tent. She gathers them around, opens an old notebook, and begins lessons as if she were running a small classroom. Without desks, blackboards, or textbooks, she insists that education is a right that cannot be stolen. For her, every lesson is an act of resistance against displacement.

Inside a tent classroom in Deir al‑Balah.

I watch Mohammad raise his hand eagerly to recite letters. Dima struggles to write a full sentence, and Malak smiles when she solves a math problem. They continue to resist erasure by insisting on learning.

My siblings’ story is not unique. Childhood is stolen daily in Gaza, not only through the loss of schools and homes but through the constant sense that the future is uncertain. Learning in tents rejects the idea that this generation will grow up without knowledge or hope.

At a water distribution point, a young girl carries a gallon of drinking water. Her steady steps express the daily struggle to secure life’s most basic needs, yet her presence embodies dignity and resilience under siege.

Having completed my degree in English language and teaching methods, I try to teach my siblings English because it is the language shared across the world. English opens a small window to the outside, gives them a tool that might one day help their voices be heard. Every word they learn is a tiny step toward breaking the isolation imposed by the siege.

Yet this resistance alone is not enough. The world must see that Israel is stripping childhood from an entire generation of Palestinians.

Childhood in Gaza is not a statistic but a life stolen day by day. Behind every number is a real child, with a postponed laugh and a broken dream. I call on the world not only to witness but to act—to protect the right of Gaza’s children to education and to childhood.

On Gaza’s beach, a young girl tries to fly a handmade kite. Behind her, tents mark displacement. She reaches for freedom in the open sky.

SHAMS MAZEN RAJAB is a twenty-three‑year‑old writer, translator, poet, and essayist from Gaza. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Teaching Methods from Al‑Aqsa University, and has completed a Continuing Education Certificate in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Awareness at University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of a poetry collection Voices That Remain, and a zine in the series Gaza Speaks: When the World Falls Silent. Her essays have been published on We Are Not Numbers and Brief Encounters.

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Editor’s note: When invited to participate in our interview series, Mathew Magro-Fry (author of “The Missing Pieces” from our Summer 2026 issue) offered to write a creative nonfiction piece on the relationship between roadtrips and his writing process:

Just off the freeway between Palm Springs and San Bernardino, a Brontosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus rex loom tall in a gas station parking lot. The T. rex is anatomically incorrect and a little goofy: his snout is boxy and squashed, he is rotund not unlike a weiner dog on hind legs, and his arms are even punier than they should be. The Brontosaurus looks particularly depressed. She has been frowning for decades. I have met these two more times than I can count, because I have been on that stretch of road—coming, going—more times than I can count. I’ve met the dinosaurs in the rain, I’ve met them late at night, on cool mornings during hot summers, on Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving Day. They will be there when I am too old to make the drive to visit them—long after this, they will be there in that parking lot, off that interstate, in that desert.

Tim O’Brien wrote, once, that you take your material where you find it. I wouldn’t have been older than one year the first time I drove (or, was driven) across the country. In the time since, I have spent an incredible portion of my life in the backseat of a car, or behind the wheel, or even in the bed of a truck. I’ve gone coast to coast, I’ve skipped from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest in a day, cut through nearly every fire road in the state of Arizona, crept through the midnight black forests in Appalachia. On the American highway, outside a car window, I’ve found that the world goes on forever. Sometimes that world is wide and flat and arid; or there are walls of thick, green trees; or acres of blackened and smoky land; or rolling hills covered in grass that ripples like water. Sometimes you find dinosaurs off the road, or biospheres, giant cans of chili, airplane graveyards, creationist museums, fields of dreams, or wooden sculptures of Sasquatch. What I’m driving at, here, is that I’ve found my material on the road.

The summer I graduated college, I took a temp job with the Arizona State Parks Department. They had me driving out to these little specks on the map to interview people who were camping or fishing or shooting guns or riding dirtbikes on protected land. Eagar, Mund’s Park, Bagdad, Big Horn, places with names like: Why. I was a city kid, born and raised in Phoenix, and I also had all the iconography of the State I could hold. The Great Seal of Arizona, emblazoned on my truck and my shirt and my hat and even the iPad I was meant to record these interviews with. I wasn’t the sort of person these people wanted to talk to. I began to take longer routes to my assignments, because I knew I wouldn’t be doing much but sitting around when I got there. I would drive all night through the backwoods, I’d sleep in the parking lots of scenic overlooks and Dollar Trees alike, I lived off of truck stop hot dogs and off-brand energy drinks, and I took detours into New Mexico, Colorado, and California, just because the road was there. It was a rough summer. They were paying me just enough to afford rent and not much more. Maybe partly out of desperation, I turned it into a time of exploration, both literally and spiritually. I was making it worth it; I was taking my material. When I think of who I am as a writer, I think of the twenty-one year old driving on too little sleep. We are both looking for something, and neither one of us knows what we’ll do when we find it.

The discipline it takes to drive for many miles over many hours is very similar to that which is required to write many words. I’m not trying to be glib. Hitting dead ends, getting lost in the back roads, these are metaphors, but they are also literally things you will do when you write. You follow a road for as long as you can, you keep your eyes open, and you remember the weird stuff off the highway: the strangers you chatted with at the gas pump, the empty towns, the color of the sky at four in the morning, the static on the radio, the way the wind takes the wild grass at dawn. This becomes the well from which you draw—your material, in other words. Sift it for what you need. Stretch it if you must. If it pleases you, invent it, and then contextualize it in the reality you’ve created with the written word. The more material you gather—which is to say, the more life you live—the easier this becomes.

Some day, when I really am too old to visit those dinosaurs in that parking lot, I will always have them—a version of them. They are my material, and my material is me.

MATHEW MAGRO-FRY is a writer living in San Diego with his wife and cats. His fiction has appeared in the North American Review, and he is a member of The Woodshed, a local writers collective. He is currently working on a novel.

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Review of Corinne Demas’s novel Daughters (Little A, New York, 2025)

Yes, you can go home again, but you might revert to the same person you were when you first decided to leave.

Corinne Demas’s novel Daughters is a compelling examination of a daughter’s long-held resentment and fear of disappointing a parent, and of a parent’s fear of losing her child’s love. Demas dramatizes moments of resistance across generations and leads us toward understanding how a family might begin to be freed from false ideas about the inner lives of other members. She also reveals that annoying habits may have their uses, and siblings can come in handy.

Meredith (sometimes referred to as Merry), a painter, suddenly arrives with her seven-year-old daughter, Eloise, at her mother Delia and stepfather Bob’s farm. She is taken in immediately and soon announces her intention to stay permanently. Her decision is met with joy by Delia and some consternation by Bob. Once ensconced at home on the farm, Meredith finds herself withdrawn and resentful. Her mother can’t stop worrying about her, and Meredith can’t stop being sullen, irritable, and easily offended. Meredith’s sniping is portrayed skillfully—as is the mother’s sense of helplessness.

Delia’s fear that Meredith may suddenly leave the farm derives from both her daughter’s previous behavior and a current threat. During one Christmas, “Delia had worked to recreate the kind of festivities she’d orchestrated when her children were little. ‘You always overdo things, Mom,’ was what Merry had said. ‘I’m outta here.’ At a much later point, when Delia asks what happened to make her leave her marriage, Meredith erupts: “I’m done talking about this. Done. Finis. I need to look after my own mental health. If you ask me about this again, I’m going to have to pack up and take Eloise and leave.” Delia instantly backs down and then makes the terrible mistake of taking an impulsive action that threatens her relationship with her daughter.

One of Demas’s achievements is her balance of sympathy: while we care for the daughter undergoing trauma, she also highlights the mother’s struggle. The mother suffers through a silence she cannot understand, as Meredith refuses to explain her return until near the end of the novel. Delia’s trial is to learn to respect her daughter’s privacy and not to intervene, no matter how much she believes she might be helpful.

Into this worrying prickliness comes Eloise, an inspired creation. Meredith’s daughter asks questions and breaks up the adults’ logjam of automatic responses, even softening the heart of Delia’s husband Bob. Her questions interrogate the family structure, forcing adults to pay attention and to watch their language.

The specter of abandonment erupts in Eloise’s voiced fears, which run throughout the novel. Appearing like ugly ghosts are memories of cruel or indifferent fathers. Eloise’s father had never wanted a child and readily foregoes custody. Delia’s father and her first husband similarly considered children annoying inconveniences. Initially, Delia’s husband, Bob, appears to share some of those attitudes, yet he supports Delia with reliable affection and learns to care for his wife’s children and her grandchild—although he often takes the opportunity to leave the room whenever tension arises, conscientiously or out of his own need for convenience.

Ironically, in this complex novel of generational struggles, distance from others is exactly what Delia and Meredith may often need—time to themselves, away from others’ judgment and their own hectoring inner voices. Delia finds a moment of peace, soothing her fretting heart, while resting in a church: “In spite of being a house of a particular religious denomination, it maintained a dignified neutrality. It didn’t instruct you on what to think or what to believe. It was just a sanctuary that said: Rest here in this quiet, figure things out at your own speed, find peace from whatever is troubling you.” The scene is particularly telling: sanctuary and acceptance are exactly what her daughter wants as well.

In recent years, it’s not unusual to see adults moving home to live with their parents. In Meredith’s case, she plans to assist on the farm, tending the animals, and creating space in the barn for her art studio. But to make the situation work for all, unresolved issues need to be confronted. What else might help Meredith? An old love interest is still in the neighborhood.

Demas excels not only at portraying family disruption but at creating a bucolic atmosphere. Existing harmoniously on the farm are delightful animals—a horse, donkeys, and wildly enthusiastic dogs. Cleverly, the author seems to suggest that her characters could learn something from those animals: to relax a little.

What do we owe our parents, and what do our parents owe us as adults? Demas is working in subterranean territory, reflecting pain across generations in dialogue stitched with sorrow and misunderstandings. In this powerfully engaging novel, she gradually leads these generations toward new respect for one another and the reader toward sympathy for both sides of the volatile, electrically-charged mother-daughter bond.

LEE UPTON’s most recent novel is a work of speculative fiction, The Withers. She was named a semi-finalist for the 2026 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her comic novel Tabitha, Get Up. The sequel, Tabitha, Stay Up, is forthcoming in September 2026. A volume of her selected poems will be out in 2027 from Saturnalia Press.

Tell us about your relationship to writing.

My relationship to writing began by being a voracious reader. I had a pivotal fourth grade teacher who instilled in me a practice of continuously engaging with books and reflecting on them after completion by submitting book reports. That same teacher also gave her students writing assignments that asked us to put into words what only we could say. I clearly remember writing about seeing myself as a writer as if the practice itself had already made it so. This simple belief is at odds with the sense that who we are—based on what we do—can only be true once it has been affirmed externally through an income, publication, being a household name, or various other label requirements I might have come to expect before I could say to others as confidently as I did at age eight that I am a writer.

While I was completing my MFA in Creative Writing, devoting the majority of my time and attention to writing and reading for the first time in my life, I realized that those two endeavors are essential to my happiness and wellbeing and therefore must be done for their own sake without attachment to what follows. I regularly pursue publication of my work, and I will continue to do so, but my commitment to writing and reading as among the most necessary pursuits of my life is not dependent on the decisions editors make. Having my work published is a very welcome affirmation, and one that I am moved to celebrate each time, but I write through rejection, an occasional scarcity mindset, and endless uncertainty about when and how those blessed affirmations will come. I write at home, sometimes playing binaural beats through headphones, often with my cat on my lap, often while nail-biting. I’m not proud of that last part.

Who have been the most influential writers in your life?

Andrew Collard, Alyssa Jewell, Alen Hamza, and Scott Bade.

Tell us about your writing process and your approach to craft.

I was assigned Elizabeth Bishop’s collected poems in a poetry workshop. At the time, I was frustrated that I wasn’t connecting with her work when it seemed like something I should be able to do as a person who studies, loves, and writes poetry. Different teachers kept assigning her poems, and I never felt anything after reading them and couldn’t tell what the poet felt or wanted her reader to feel. Learning more about her background and her distaste for confessional poetry, it made sense to me why it was difficult to access the emotions of her guarded, metaphorical, and vague references to her sexuality and alcoholism. It has taken me a while, and a lot of practice, to write what are appropriately categorized as confessional poems, and those are often the poems I most readily attach to as a reader.

Is “My Therapist Asserts...” accomplishing what you set out for it to do at the beginning of writing it? What’s your favorite line or image from it?

I started writing this poem with the title in place and the image of a coffee mug with vulva fruit depictions on it in my therapist’s office, both of which are real experiences. Ultimately, the poem attempts to unravel shame, while demonstrating that even in the act of confessing, the chorus of “what will they think” questions cannot be entirely quieted. I feel sure I would have immediately sung the praises of Bishop’s work had she been more explicit, more open, more raw, but I understand that historical context matters, and that every writer has to determine what to reveal and how to reveal it. Here I am also conveying that confessional poems can still be self-conscious, which is one way of being guarded.

My favorite line is “whose pointers I memorized the tips of” followed by the fourth wall break, “oh no, look what I’ve done / another confessional poem.” There is tenderness when I read it, like the speaker doesn’t know how to accept that she gets to claim a truth about herself and her sexuality without simultaneously answering to an audience with countless wagging fingers. There is something of a passive rebellion to it because no one is actually there shaming her in that moment, but she has internalized those collective messages so completely that it’s as if she’s performing liberation to get back at them.

What’s been inspiring you lately?

I’ve been working my way through the recently released collected poems of Larry Levis (Swirl & Vortex), and I finish most of his poems with my mouth open in total awe at his ability to present everyday events with careful attention to their deeper meanings. His poems send me on searches for other examples in poetry of extracting understanding of ourselves and others through common encounters and seemingly meaningless details we overhear that we can’t shake from our recurring thoughts. So much of our lives are made up of unexpected interactions, conversations, mundane work tasks, and many other things we would never include in an answer to the question, “how was your day?” Each and every life, no matter what it contains, is fodder for poems like Larry Levis wrote. That is endlessly inspiring.

Do you have any non-literary talents/hobbies?

I am a singer, which exists in tandem with my writing life. There were swaths of time in my twenties when singing and writing seemed in conflict with each other, like I had to pick one, but I have long since reconciled that both deserve my time and attention, and both make meaningful contributions to my happiness.

What are you reading right now?

In addition to Larry Levis and poetry collections by Iliana Rocha and Monica Youn, I am reading The Years by Annie Ernaux. I’m undertaking a large creative nonfiction writing project, and I am intent on reading a variety of approaches to memoir throughout the writing process.

What are you writing?

I recently began submitting my first full-length poetry manuscript to publishers, and I am continuing to write and submit poems while the collection makes its way into the hands of readers and editors. I’m also in the early stages of drafting a memoir that is structured around Parts Work therapy as a way of understanding my relationships with others, namely my father who passed away nine years ago from a short battle with primary brain cancer. As a poet who normally has no reason to keep track of word counts or page counts, and who is used to drafting a whole poem in one sitting, I am a bit intimidated by a longer project that could realistically take years to fully draft. I am still compelled to do it, so I am drafting in sections with titles that begin with “The Part That…” such as, “The Part That Is Body Bound.”

EMILY R. DANIEL’s chapbook, Life Line, was selected as a winner of the 2020 Celery City Chapbook Prize. Emily is a Best of the Net nominee, and her work can be found in The Penn Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Waxwing, Porter House Review, and forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, among others. Emily lives with her family in Kalamazoo, MI where she earned an MFA in Poetry at Western Michigan University and was Poetry Editor for Third Coast Magazine. For more information, visit www.emilyrdaniel.com

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Are you filling your grill? Tis the season
For hanging outdoors under trees on
A warm, sunny day
With a brewski array
and a comfortable lawn chair to ease in.

1.

Keep a cold Daisy Cutter nearby,
For this hop-head can well certify
That it’s piney, but light
On the tongue: a delight-
ful Pale Ale with a citrusy vibe.

2.

For your cookout, this Shackmeister Ale
Is refreshingly balanced and pale.
It’s a crushable beer
That is amber and clear:
Pair with burgers, potatoes, and kale.

3.

Here’s a berry concoction for you
To imbibe at your next barbecue.
The Flamingo Dreams pours
Purple-pink, so adore
Tastes of raspberry-currant in brew.

Tasting Notes:

Daisy Cutter Pale Ale. Half Acre Beer Co., Chicago, IL, 5.2% ABV.
This well-hopped pale pours dark amber with a white, fine-bubbled head that hugs your glass with light lace. Its aroma evokes a West Coast IPA, but the thinner mouthfeel glides down your tongue (and the lower ABV won’t get you lit). With its piney and citrusy notes, this hop-forward beer is pitch-perfect on a Summer afternoon.

Shackmeister Ale. Brooklyn Brewery, Brooklyn, NY. 4.8% ABV.
This beer pours medium amber with a lively, off-white head, and has a crushable mouthfeel that pairs well with cookouts. Hitting the center of the pale ale spectrum, its hops and malt backbone play well together, finishing with some fizz and citrusy notes. The “brewed for burgers” slogan is spot-on.

Flamingo Dreams Nitro Berry Blonde Ale. Left Hand Brewing Co., Longmont, CO. 4.7% ABV.
This translucent, purplish-pink brew has lilac-pink head that lightly foams your glass as you sip its tangy-sweet flavor. It’s refreshing, but don’t quaff so you’ll appreciate the rich berry profile with raspberry and blackcurrant. A beer drinker’s Cape Codder, with a fuller mouthfeel and lower ABV.

Marsha Bryant writes about literature, culture, and craft beer. Her recent essays appear in The Poetry of Bob Dylan, Creativity in the Classroom, and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath. Marsha taught for many years at the University of Florida. Her Untappd handle is LimerickLady.

This is an edited transcription of a larger recorded conversation between Kelsi Vanada and Emilio Jurado Naón, available in full below. Vanada is the translator, and Naón the author, of the novel Agustina Paz, an excerpt of which is featured in our Summer 2026 issue.

Readings from the novel excerpt happen in Spanish from 5:55–7:46 and 17:24–19:21; the translated English readings happen from 7:47–9:54 and 19:22–21:27.

[Emilio Jurado Naón, author]:
Your translation sounds beautiful, so thank you. I was intrigued about how it would be to [hear] my own writing in English; this is the first time I’ve been translated into English. I had the opportunity to be translated into Hungarian, but I can’t read that... This is the first time I can give testimony about a translation, to have an opinion about the work of another.

I was wondering how you began to translate from Spanish and from Swedish. What Spanish poetry first engaged you? How would you say your work as a literary translator influences your poetry writing and vice versa?

[Kelsi Vanada, translator]:
Spanish is the language that I learned in school, and it ended up being my second major in my bachelor’s degree, along with English. Swedish came a little later. My ancestors came from Denmark, so when I was in college I studied abroad in Copenhagen and learned some Danish. I met Mari Sidgaberg, who came to Iowa City where I was in graduate school, and we were paired together to translate some of her work into English.

As a pretty young person, I was reading (at least excerpts of) Octavio Paz and Neruda and García Márquez; Laura Esquivel and Gabriela Mistral were some early ones for me. While taking a class with Spanish MFA students at Iowa, I was reading a lot of wonderful contemporary Spanish-language poetry from all over the world, and a lot of those authors became very dear friends—so I now translate them. I love to find out who they’re reading and who they think should be translated into English; that’s how I have found a lot of my projects.

I feel like my translation work influences my own writing by giving me a way to write in voices or forms that I would never have thought of for myself. My own poems are kind of short and tight, so it’s wonderful to work on pieces like yours where I get to really inhabit these wonderful long sentences, and experience the music of them by putting them in English. And, the other way, I suppose I have kind of a particular [writing] voice, which, when it’s a good fit for the piece of writing [being translated], then that’s kind of the sweet spot. That’s when it’s really magical.

[Naón]:
Yeah, it’s nice to think of how the poets one translates get into your own mind and way of writing. Stealing others’ voices, too, in the best way possible.

[Vanada]:
Yeah, that’s right. It is a kind of stealing, or a remixing that I’m really drawn to. There are many metaphors to try to explain the work of translation, but I’m really drawn to the ones that think about translation as interpreting a piece of music, or even a covering—doing a musical cover of a song.

[Naón]:
... I started translating poems as an exercise to practice English, to expand my vocabulary and improve my reading comprehension. But also, at some point, I began doing it as a form of writing practice or exercise. Many writers say that when you feel blocked in your own writing, the best thing you can do is focus on someone else’s text. Translating a poem requires many of the same skills as writing one of your own poems from scratch, except that it relieves you, I think, of having to invent [something]. It’s like a brain teaser to me, it’s like a game. It also gives me new oxygen when I feel stuck in my own writing.

Translator Kelsi Vanada.

[Vanada]:
How did you come to write Agustina Paz? Tell us a little bit about its historical setting and what interests you about this period in Argentina’s history.

[Naón]:
Agustina Paz is based on a historical event from the early 19th century in South America. It was a period of civil wars that followed the wars of independence. Agustina Paz was the daughter of an important politician in the province of Tucumán, now part of Argentina. The story goes that she saved the life of a convicted enemy of the government by asking for his hand in marriage. With this man, José Segundo Roca, Agustina had several children: One of them was Julio Argentino Roca, who came to be the builder of the modern state in Argentina, the unifier of the nation and a two-time president of the country, and also a perpetrator of the indigenous people, among other famous (and infamous) distinctions. He’s a really important important figure here in Argentina.

My work in this novel is driven by an interest in how the history of our region remains alive in, and in tension with, the way we speak our language, and the way we fight and work together and imagine through it. I have published three other books centered on Roca and his generation, always experimenting with a different literary genre. It is a long-term project, still going on, which I call Los Roca y los yo, which could be translated as The Rocas and Myselfs. The perspective I try to explore in each chapter or artifact of this long project has to do with the intersections between the national and the personal, between country and family, since I’m also a descendant of this Roca on my mother’s side.

[Vanada]:
I didn’t know that part about your own family!

[Naón]:
It’s a secret I only tell in some interviews.

Author Emilio Jurado Naón. Photo credit: Ioni Epelbaum.

[Vanada]:
Reviewers often comment on the poetic nature of your prose, and for a translator like me, who usually works on more contemporary language, it was a very good challenge to translate your beautiful and complex sentences. Can you share more about the historical voice, or the language of the novel?

[Naón]:
Thank you. And it’s true, many reviews of my work underline this poetic (or even wordy) style. This observation, I always quote one of my favorite Argentine writers, Ricardo Zelarayan, who maintained, being both a fiction writer and a poet himself, that the distinction between verse and prose is ultimately unhelpful. Both for writing and for reading. In his endearingly politically incorrect way, he used to say that any fiction writer who did not read poetry was semi-illiterate.

When it comes to construction of a historical voice, a wide lexicon can be very effective, you know, or perhaps it is the other way around: An 18th century plot is the best excuse I have to use a cluster of old words. What contradicts this is that the language of Agustina Paz, I think, only appears historical at first glance. The characters, plot, context, and settings belong to a historical past. But the language soon reveals its own anachronism. And I think that this linguistic anachronism is one of the places where poetry achieves some of its powerful effects.

[Vanada]:
And the language of this work is very unique because there are some older words, yet Agustina also sounds... She’s approachable; she’s somehow contemporary.

[Naón]:
There are some words or some phrases, idiomatic phrases, which sound almost ridiculously contemporary, or colloquial to Buenos Aires, today. Also, there is a tension between the language in Tucumán and in Buenos Aires, which are really far apart; we have different ways of speaking, different accents. Taking language far from today’s conversations also creates an anachronism.

[For the feminine voice of Agustina], I tried to study some novels with feminine characters: Carson McCullers, Clarice Lispector, and Ágota Kristóf. They were really useful in trying to make a dry voice for this character.

KELSI VANADA is a poet and literary translator. She is the author of the collection Optional Saint (Bench Editions) and the chapbook Rare Earth, and the translator from Spanish and Swedish of seven books of poetry and creative nonfiction. Kelsi was a 2024 NEA Translation Fellow and holds MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Iowa Translation Workshop. She is the Senior Program Director of the American Literary Translators Association in Tucson, AZ.

EMILIO JURADO NAÓN was born in Buenos Aires in 1989. He holds a degree from and is a professor of Letters at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), and co-directs Rapallo, a magazine and publisher of poems and essays. In the ongoing series “Los Roca y los yo,” he has published the books Tópico de los dos viajeros (Palabras Amarillas), Zanja grande (Slimbook), Los Pincén (Omnívora), and Agustina Paz (Emecé). Jurado Naón coordinates the Hurlingham City Literary Workshop and is co-director of the American Poetry Festival in Hurlingham (FAPH).

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Photo credit: Chukwunonso Nwanze. On a visit to Ellis Island, New York, in 2007. At the height of European immigration, twelve million people passed through this hall with a new country’s name waiting for them. I arrived differently—by plane, by choice, by the long aftermath of a history that brought some here without asking. What America owes, and to whom, is still being negotiated.

The word America was not born in America.

It arrived by the slip of a pen in a mountain town in Lorraine, France, where a printer named Martin Waldseemüller read the accounts of Amerigo Vespucci and smoothed the man’s name into Latin, Americus, then gave it the feminine ending that continents received. Thus, a people and a place were bound to an echo of a man who never stood at the banks of the Mississippi, who never saw corn rise like gold, who never heard the drums of the Africans carried to it unwilling across oceans.

There are other etymologies, less documented and no less alive. Some trace America to the Amerrique mountains of Nicaragua, where Indigenous tongues shaped the sounds of “land of wind” long before any Florentine dreamed of mapping it. Others chase roots into Spanish amargo—bitter. The poets might linger on amargo. What is America, after all, if not a speech still unfinished, a bitterness still trying to sweeten itself by dawn?

I begin here—at the instability of the name—because it tells us something essential. America has always been a contested act of naming. A story that began somewhere else, arrived through the machinery of European ambition, and was pressed onto a land and a people who had their own names for everything long before the cartographers came. In 2026, as the United States marks 250 years of its founding declaration, that instability has not resolved. It has only accumulated.

The question I have pondered is not whether America kept its promise. It is whether the promise was ever whole.

I grew up in Nigeria, surrounded to some degree by Igbo cosmology—a world that did not separate the living from the ancestral, the personal from the communal, the present from the long memory that precedes it. Omenala—the cultural laws that bind a people to their identity and to each other—was not folklore. It was infrastructure.

The disruption of cultural memory is not simply a matter of loss. It is a matter of health. When the threads connecting a person to their ancestral identity are severed—through slavery, colonization, migration, the slow erasure of language and ritual and naming—the body and the psyche register that severance. A severance that is not metaphorical. That severance is measurable. This is the territory Resmaa Menakem maps in his work on somatic intergenerational trauma, and Fanon in the colonial damage to the psyche. What these scholars name in different registers is one truth: you cannot take a person from their story without taking something from their nervous system.

America, at 250, is a nation that has never reckoned with what it took.

In my novel He Shall Return, an Igbo ancestor named Afamefuna is stolen into the transatlantic slave trade. He is renamed George. He survives—in Barbados, in Mississippi, in the long corridor of American history that tried to make him only useful, never whole.

The Igbo ọjà flute he once played travels with him not in his hands but in the line he produces, surfacing generations later in a Rochester jazz bar, played by a young woman who does not fully understand why the instrument makes her grieve.

It grieves because it remembers. Objects, songs, gestures, ways of moving carry what documentation destroys. The archive of a people is not only in their libraries. It is in their bodies.

This is why the distinction between heritage and memory is the hinge on which everything turns. Heritage is what is curated for you—the museum exhibit, the month of recognition, the sanitized national narrative that makes loss palatable. Memory is what is carried in the body: the ọjà that moves through generations unnamed but unextinguished, the melodies an elder hums while shelling beans in Nsukka, older than anything written down.

Photo credit: Chukwunonso Nwanze. New York, in 2007. The Statue of Liberty stands on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, a short distance from Ellis Island.

America is extraordinarily good at heritage. It is still learning—at 250, still only learning—to reckon with memory.

This is not abstraction. Consider the Black soldiers of the Quartermaster Corps—the men who were not given rifles but crates, not given glory but logistics, not given the front lines but the supply lines that made the front lines possible. Men who lifted ammunition and food rations for a front that denied them the GI Bill when they returned, who built groceries and churches and institutions in cities that hung banners for white veterans and offered Black men nothing from the federal programs their taxes had funded. Men who reconstituted themselves from what was never taken—a mother’s humming, a brother’s trumpet in a Paris jazz club, the music that lived in the throat between the crates.

I am writing a novel that lives inside that history. It asks whether America, at 250, has earned the promise it made to itself. I do not yet know how America will answer. But I know what those men built while it was deciding.

Near the end of He Shall Return, Alexander Norwood—Afamefuna’s modern descendant—stands in the village of Nnobi, where his ancestor was taken from. He returns Afamefuna’s name to the soil that knew it first. Alexander does not return the name as George, or as a genealogical data point. He returns the name fulfilling its meaning: Afamefuna—My name shall not be lost.

It is an act of counter-naming. A refusal to accept that a people’s story begins at the point of their dispossession. An insistence that before the taking, there was a wholeness. And that the wholeness can be called back.

This is what I believe America needs at 250: not a renegotiation of its founding documents, though that work matters; nor policy reform, though that work is urgent. It needs an act of counter-naming. A willingness to say, in public, in ceremony, in the national body: the story did not begin with us. The story was already ancient when we arrived. And we took more than land.

What cultural memory offers is the framework for that reckoning. A framework that does not succumb to guilt as paralysis. A framework that unapologetically announces that memory is medicine. The kind of remembering that does not destroy but reorients, does not assign blame so much as it assigns responsibility. That asks not “Who did this?” but “What do we owe, and how do we begin to pay it?”

The celebrations will come. The monuments and speeches will locate the country’s greatness in its founding documents. But the celebration will be incomplete without the voices that have always been America’s moral conscience—the people who were never in the room when the promise was made, who built the room anyway, who have spent 250 years insisting that the promise include them.

It is a song. It has always been a song. The question is whether America is finally ready to learn all the verses—including the ones it forgot to write down, because it never expected the people singing them to survive.

They did. We did. We are still singing.

CHUKWUNONSO NWANZE is the founder of Omenala Group and the author of He Shall Return (2023), a novel of ancestral memory, diaspora identity, and the long work of return. She is currently completing her second novel.

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Describe the first time you translated from another language. Where were you? What sounds or smells or sights do you remember? Do you remember anything happening to you in that moment?

In preschool I could write my cursive well so my teachers would prompt me randomly to the page like a wind-up doll. One asked me to write about my summer on the first day back, so I wrote that my cousins and I got to be in an RB with all our family and drive around town and have sleepovers on it. The teacher said, I think you mean RV, which I’d never heard of, so I explained I must be talking about something different and what I was referring to was called an RB, as our parents had called it and as we called it too. We were referring to different experiences even if gesturing at the same object, or shape of an object, especially in a first act of written translation.

You mentioned in an interview with the Hopkins Review that your first on-paper translation involved translating DACA paperwork. Is there a parallel between that paperwork and the manifold nature of poetry?

There was a form in front of us and translation is a bit like that: something exists. There is less of that Big Bang narrative of a poem’s fantastical existence.

What other professions have you done?

I was an assistant and I was super at it. I miss being a teacher at a big public high school very much.

I was re-reading your translation of Kim Hyesoon’s poem “That Place 5,” which appeared in our summer 2025 issue. How has translating Kim’s work impacted your own definitions of power, subjugation, resistance, and/or despair?

The poem is one of seven she wrote after being slapped seven times. Frustratingly and glamorously, at the end of language, there is only language.

In your last interview with us, you talked about the “automation and outsourcing of mass death by the state and its supremacists” and how that is reflected in communication tools such as automatic transcriptions, specifically how the errors they produce in their work have violent implications. Given how exponential AI has grown since then, how do you as an artist and human being cope with this growing bond of dehumanization found between cultural institutions, governmental bodies, and technocratic corporations?

I don’t cope with it. It really disturbs me and it should. In my airlocked world I forget (the automatic transcriptions you mention now off) and then my doctor asks me about being recorded and transcribed (by a company that always shares actors with so called “defense” technologies) or I get a generated email from an administrator that makes no sense (with a saccharine tone meant to feel frictionless that I experience as hostile and empty). It’s interesting I said that three years ago. The developments do feel yoked to (the yolk of . . .) the violence of “you matched a description.”

Is there a ‘useful distance’ in your work as translation? Another way of putting it, how does the act of translating swing between living in the words of another writer and studying the craft of one working in another language?

Living probably requires studying and studying requires living. Translation tends to be likened a lot; it can be fun to think through how it is scholarship or editing or reading or writing, but collation can also limit. Being a guardian to a child includes some of the same tasks and intentions as being a babysitter, a lifeguard, or a pediatric oncologist, but most don’t find it that useful to focus on the similarities between these roles.

In what ways does translating a piece of writing into English allow a different group of readers to access a work? Is there a kind of liberation—either for the poet, the reader, or even the translator—to be found in poetry?

English is not a language of liberation. Translation into it is not in the best interest of most people globally.

How do you approach selecting pieces to submit to various journals or magazines, especially considering how they might appear in a forthcoming collection? Is there something specific you look for when matching pieces to journals?

In this case I think I had the former translation editor Mona Kareem in mind when I decided to submit and chose poems to send. I rarely submit now, once or twice a year if that, but before we last talked, I submitted widely. All my publications came from general submissions, including both books. To students wondering about those mechanics, I recommend reading the journals they consider.

What’s the funniest thing you’ve seen, heard, or thought recently?

My friend made an expressive noise while telling a critical point of a story at dim sum the other day and I could have kept reenacted it all night. I still think it was so funny and perfect and wish I could recreate the moment.

CINDY JUYOUNG OK is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets, translator of The Hell of That Star from the Wesleyan Poetry Series, and an assistant English professor at UC Davis.

“a book knows its place in the library
but I have no address in this wide world.”
—Epiphanie Mukasano, 2010

“later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
—Warsan Shire, 2015

We are a collective of artists, writers, scholars, teachers, activists and community members brought together by our commitment to African feminism. Precisely because of this, we abhor and reject any attempt to divide us and instill hatred and violence against our fellow African friends, colleagues, teachers, neighbours and loved ones.

We stand with our friends, colleagues, family, neighbours and loved ones suddenly labeled “foreign” and “undocumented” and with those in South Africa who reject the latest xenophobic and Afrophobic acts of violence. We stand with all those who have been victimized and been made to feel unsafe and unwelcome.

We note that some sectors in South Africa are deliberately exploiting and inflaming such rhetoric and violence. The consequences for members of our communities who are called “foreign” or “undocumented” are catastrophic. Yet we know from the long, vital and loving connections sustained over the decades—that literally kept South Africans alive and played a central role in our struggle for freedom—that our real communities cross the divisions created by passports and borders.

We call on all South Africans, Africans and especially those in positions of leadership to refuse, reject and take action to stop all xenophobic actions and rhetoric. For those in the academy, our voice and actions can also reassure our students and others who suddenly find themselves labeled “foreign” and “undocumented,” sometimes by those who themselves a generation ago would have been called the same. Of course, labeling people as “other” is a violent way to claim a sense of legitimacy and belonging.

South Africa has always been infused with and strengthened by our connections with people across our borders. We in the African feminist community live this reality each day. Let us stand up for that reality and refuse the one created by malicious forces who are deliberately fomenting and exploiting divisions between us.

“no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well.”
—Warsan Shire, 2009

“Dispossessed
Is not the same as empty
I was born into extraction
I still choose creation
The atoms of this body remember abundance
I receive
because I am part of the making”
— Lebo Mashile, We Are Not Waiting, 2026

This statement is endorsed by the African Feminist Initiative, the English departments at University of the Western Cape, Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, the Wits Department of Political Studies and the Palestine Solidarity Coalition at the University of the Western Cape (PSCUWC).

It joins a growing chorus of voices against Afrophobia/ xenophobia inside and outside the academy. A selection of mobilisations and readings follows.

a. Latest Anti-Xenophobia Campaign

b. The Economic Freedom Fighters political party has been consistent on the non-negotiability of Pan Africanism. Multiple EFF leaders speak out regularly against Afrophobia. The EFF has also mounted counter-marches to the xenopobhic March-on-Marches in different cities.

c. The nationwide mass-based shack dwellers movement Abahlali BaseMjondolo and the Unemployed People’s Movement have led grassroots resistance to xenophobia for many years. Several months before the current wave was reported in mainstream national and international media, Abahlali partnered with the Congolese Solidarity Movement in Durban to defend African migrants against violence in poor communities. This clip shows the aftermath of Abahlali and their allies successfully ending a xenophobic march. Abahlali have organized several marches that centered their rejection of anti-poor and anti-African violence and rhetoric.

d. Go home or die here: Violence, xenophobia and the reinvention of difference in South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Photo: Islamic University of Gaza. “The science and library buildings.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, 2018.

Each time I see another student from Gaza manage to leave to pursue their studies, I feel depressed. This is not jealousy. It is the pain of my multiple failed attempts to secure a scholarship and fulfill my dream of a real education, as they are doing.

I graduated from secondary school, Tawjihi, as we call it, in 2023 with a GPA of 99.4%. My high GPA opened up several opportunities for me to pursue my studies abroad. However, at the time, I thought I was still too young and inexperienced to live alone in another part of the world. I was deeply attached to my family. Now, I regret that decision. I wish I had been encouraged to take that bold step into the unknown. Is it too late for me?

I am currently a third year student at Islamic University of Gaza. I had only spent one month at university before the U.S.-Israel genocide began on October 7. Our education was suspended for almost nine months until the university announced the resumption of classes through an online learning system.

Online learning is challenging. To study behind screens, I walk long distances just to access the internet and electricity. But I persisted, resuming my education while at the same time applying for every scholarship I could find. The process was filled with endless barriers. Every scholarship application requires a stable internet connection, a smartphone or laptop, and official documents such as an ID, birth certificate, and sometimes a passport.

On the night of October 18th 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces called my family’s house and told us we had five minutes to flee before they destroyed our home. That time was not enough to take anything with us, including money and important documents. The building collapsed before our eyes, along with everything inside. It took a long time to replace the documents we had lost. Not having an ID deprived me of applying for many scholarships that could have changed my life.

One day, a friend informed me about a scholarship whose deadline was that very same day.

I rushed to prepare everything I might need. Suddenly, the internet was cut off. It had already been unstable, but at least I had been able to open the scholarship page, so it had not seemed like a major problem until the connection disappeared completely.

I thought it would return within a few minutes. I waited for one hour, then two, then three, yet it never came back. The clock reached 12:00, and the deadline passed.

My friend called to ask whether I had managed to submit the application. Furious and overwhelmed, I told her that I would never apply for any scholarship again and that I was exhausted by the endless obstacles that impeded me.

I continued applying despite all the disappointment, not because I was a determined person who never gave up, but because I was tired of everything around me, especially the learning system we were forced to adapt to.

Most scholarships require an English language proficiency test, especially IELTS or TOEFL, both of which have become unavailable in Gaza. The centers that once offered these tests and provided preparatory courses have either been destroyed or forced to shut down and leave Gaza due to the constant bombardment and threats.

There is now an alternative test, the Duolingo English Test. However, it requires a quiet space, a stable internet connection, and proper preparation and practicing, which are extremely difficult to secure all at once in Gaza. In addition, not all universities or scholarships accept this particular test.

Last year, I applied for an Irish scholarship, and my application was conditionally accepted. To complete it, I had to take the Duolingo English Test. At that time, in December 2025, we were displaced to a tent in the Al-Mawasi area. I could not even find a quiet place to practice. When I began the test, I lost concentration because of the noise around me, and I was unable to complete it.

The university informed me that they would not be able to consider my application because the English language test was mandatory. Just like that, I lost another opportunity.

Since the genocide began, I have applied for two Turkish scholarships. I was accepted into one program, but because Turkey did not arrange evacuation efforts for the selected students, I lost yet another chance to pursue my education abroad.

These obstacles stand in the way of thousands of students whose only dream is to study under normal learning conditions, then return stronger and well-educated to support their homeland. We are deeply aware of the power of education in the journey toward freedom.

Yet many students are still prevented from leaving Gaza, even though depopulating the Strip has long been part of Israel’s plan. The reason, I believe, is that Israel understands the power of education and its influence on minds and societies. Hence its systematic destruction of our educational institutions.

Still, I continue to apply, with a hope that one day no barriers will define the limits of my education. I continue to reach for my future as a person who truly believes that knowledge is more powerful than any weapon.

MARIAM MUSHTAHA is a Gaza-based writer and an English language student. Her work has appeared in We Are Not Numbers, Al Jazeera English, Prism Report, The New Humanitarian, Markaz Review, The Progressive, and the Palestine Chronicle.

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A review of Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation and Liberation, edited by Raouf Farrah and Suraya Dadoo. Pluto Press, 2026.

During a 2025 residency in Lagos, I met with some of the local LGBTQ organizers hosting me. I was wearing a Free Palestine bracelet when someone asked me a question I hadn’t been prepared to answer: “Why should we care about what happens in Palestine when we have our own struggles to deal with?” The question shook me to my core. After all, who was I to speak on the African struggle from the safe periphery of the diaspora? This question had implications about the impact of local crises and whether solidarity is viable when people are simply trying to survive. Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation and Liberation provides an answer to that very question. The collection does not ask Africa to turn away from itself to see Palestine, but rather argues plainly that Palestine is one of the places through which Africa can see its own struggles for liberation more clearly. The same colonial logics exercised in many African countries are not disconnected from those exercised in the occupation and ongoing genocide in Palestine.

One might expect a book called Rising for Palestine to open with an appeal to conscience. Instead, the anthology begins with an even more challenging idea: the genocide in Palestine is not happening because the world doesn’t know, but because it does, yet the fact of that knowledge has not been enough to stop it. The genocide, here, is not hidden from view. It is in images, livestreams, testimonies, court documents, destroyed buildings, and on our screens. The problem is not a lack of evidence, but a political order that can witness such evidence and still justify, rationalize, and enable the destruction of a people.

Rising for Palestine considers solidarity not only as recognition but also as a process that must be understood in relation to memory, law, state betrayal, religious ideology, surveillance, climate, media, and feminist organizing. Its opening section, “Legacies of Violence: Genocide, Colonialism and Oppression,” sets the tone of the book’s approach. The aim is not to dissolve Gaza into Namibia, Congo, Algeria, Rwanda, Sudan, or Western Sahara—as if all colonial histories are to be abandoned—but rather to sit these stories next to each other to see the same colonial logics at play: land seized under the guise of security, violence against resistance, whole populations displaced or decimated.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s “Seeing Genocide, Ending Genocide” asks one of the collection’s most important ethical questions. She proposes that the Palestinian people have documented their own destruction in real time since October 2023 in Gaza, and they have been asking the world not only to see it but to do something about it. Azoulay insists on the failures of witnessing without action, stating that photographs are not just records of suffering but efforts to restore the conditions for truth-telling against certain forms of erasure. Her essay links the current devastation of Gaza to 1948, when Palestinian cities, homes, archives, and lives were violently remade in the image of a settler state. This is one of the anthology’s most important moves: Gaza is not treated as a sudden exception, but as part of a longer regime of dispossession and extermination. As Azoulay writes: “Genocide under colonial regimes . . . surpasses the event and consists of an attack on human diversity” (19).

The anthology’s historical reach is one of its greatest strengths. It is not simply a celebration or an epic story of African solidarity; it directly addresses complicity. The book thinks back to a time when anti-colonial formations around the continent saw Palestine as part of a common liberation struggle. Saleh Hijazi states in her essay, “The 2024 ACHPR Resolution on Palestine,” “To make solidarity meaningful, it must be rooted in the principle that justice is indivisible. As Nelson Mandela famously stated, ‘our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians’” (116). Here she tracks the erosion of that clarity under neoliberalism, security partnerships, development deals, and normalization. “Africa” is not regarded as morally innocent, as African governments, elites, churches, and institutions are implicated in the weakening of solidarity. In this way, an empire does not always come in the form of conquest; sometimes it comes as aid, counterterrorism, agricultural expertise, police technology, or biblical destiny.

In the chapters on Nigeria, faith and queer organizing are inextricably linked. Suraya Dadoo’s “Weaponizing Faith: Christian Zionism in Africa” demonstrates that solidarity is a contested point not only in the streets and at the UN but also in churches, pulpits, voting booths, and the political imagination of believers. Dadoo notes that Nigeria is a place where Israeli diplomats have developed relationships with Pentecostal leaders, even as the Nigerian government has continued to advocate for Palestinian self-determination at the UN. This contradiction matters. It tells us that Nigeria can never be reduced to heroic solidarity or religious supremacy. The struggle persists. Dadoo’s chapter makes clear that faith can be and has been a vehicle through which foreign policy seeps into the hearts and souls of communities. In other parts of Africa, Christian Zionism not only teaches believers to support Israel but also turns criticism of Israeli violence into an attack on Christianity itself. Dadoo writes that “faith is weaponised as foreign policy” (190). Nigerian Reverend Kolade Fadahunsi’s warning that Christians must not “throw the Palestinian people under the bus of Israeli oppression” if they are to seek divine favor is one of the chapter’s most direct repudiations of that ideology.

Rosebell Kagumire’s “Our Struggles Are One: Pan-African Feminists Keeping Palestine Solidarity Alive” offers the most intimate answer to the opening question of this review: “Why should we care about what happens in Palestine when we have our own struggles to deal with?” Kagumire writes from a place of grief, witnessing, and feminist organizing to hold many different crises with careful consideration without making them into a competition. “The settler-colonial state and the truth are always strangers” (242). For Kagumire, the attack on Palestinian journalists is also an attack on the record, on testimony, and on the possibility that the colonized might narrate their own destruction before power can rename it.

The essay becomes even more urgent in its section about queer solidarity and pinkwashing. Kagumire writes of how Palestine and queer freedom have been fused by Israel’s use of LGBTQ symbolism to sanitize its occupation. An Israeli story of a pride flag raised by a soldier over the ruins of Gaza is obscene because it turns queerness into imperial decoration. At the same time, queer organizers have sought to make visible and fight Israeli pinkwashing campaigns. For example, Kagumire points to Global South queer organizing against an Israeli organization’s bid to host the 2027 ILGA World Conference—the largest global gathering of LGBTQ leaders—which has now been canceled.

Kagumire notes that some African queer organizers see solidarity with Palestinian queer people as crucial when queerness is painted as divisible and foreign to African identity. In this way, the Lagos question is turned on its head. To ask why an African queer person should care about Palestine assumes that these struggles can be separated cleanly. But the forces that make African queerness look foreign, disposable, or punishable are not unrelated to the forces that make Palestinian life available for occupation, pinkwashing, and erasure. In both cases, power determines who counts: who counts as civilized, who counts as a victim, and whose freedom is forfeit for the comfort of the state.

If I could go back to that moment in Lagos when that question was posed, this is the answer I would give: Solidarity is not a distraction from local struggles, but one of how local struggles become more discernible. As the anthology presents, Palestine is not asking us to care less about ourselves. It’s asking whether any of us can become free in a global system that seeks to divide us, a task made easier when we abandon one another.

RICHMOND WILLS is a Nigerian-American writer, and professor at UMass Amherst. A Point Foundation Scholar and Prose Editor at the Massachusetts Review, his work is grounded in African Diaspora, marginal and queer migrant narratives, and exploring what remains unsaid. He is currently at work on his first novel.

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An excerpt of "Geographical Histories of Centralia, Kansas," written and read by Jodi Cressman. The full piece appears in our new Summer 2026 issue.

Tell us about your relationship to writing.

For most of my professional life, I was an academic writer composing scholarly essays for a narrow audience of contemporary literature subspecialists. Then, five years ago, two things happened: I was asked to teach a creative writing class, and I figured I should try it out myself before telling other people how to do it; and, around the same time, I took a trip to Centralia, Illinois, learned about the mining disaster in that town’s history, and fell headlong into the rabbit hole of my current project, a hybrid memoir-history that explores all of the towns named Centralia in the U.S. With some of these towns, the historical material is so thin that I had to draw on personal memory and subjective experience to get what those places meant to me. It’s taken me a while to shed the worst features of academic writing (the technical vocabulary, the need to endlessly contextualize and qualify, and so forth). At first, I tried to drop my scholarly voice altogether, but I could never fully break free from it: it’s too baked in. Over time, I realized that I didn’t need to—I could blend scholarly and creative approaches, interweaving them in a larger composite. Once I finish this Centralia project, I want to dive more fully into documentary poetry, pursuing that same blend in a different artistic form.

Do you have any non-literary hobbies?

I think my family would say that I’m a talented baker. I’m also an enthusiastic but unskilled gardener. And I go through flare-ups of various passions. A couple of years ago, I took up sewing and made pants out of psychedelic-prints for everyone in my family, I think seventeen pairs altogether. They were not particularly good pants; the pant-legs were often uneven. I think everybody’s glad that experiment’s over.

Who have been the most influential writers in your life?

Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison left the deepest marks. In terms of contemporary prose, Eula Biss and Maggie Nelson have been transformative, and, in poetry, I have been awed by Claudia Rankine, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Layli Long Soldier, Paisley Rekdal (her extraordinary book West, especially), Susan Briante, and every word that Anne Carson has ever put on a page.

What’s been inspiring you lately?

These days, I’m paying a lot of attention to the people around me who show courage, not just in big moments, but as a matter of habit—small, regular micro-acts of bravery. Like people who stand on corners holding protest signs in their small, rural towns, where they are likely to know the neighbors shouting obscenities at them from cars. Or young people trying to make a career in stand-up comedy, facing rejection in immediate, palpable, public ways. Or my students who choose to study art or philosophy or English, going against the advice of their well-meaning parents. They remind me that I don’t need to save up my reserves of bravery for the obviously significant moments, but can push myself personally and artistically in small ways as a matter of course.

Tell us about your writing process and your approach to craft, generally or for your featured piece, “Geographical Histories of Centralia, Kansas.”

My writing process is incredibly slow, and a lot of it involves things other than writing. I usually begin by making lists: specific images, memories, lines from materials in the archives. After that, I read broadly, following my intuition as to what I should pick up next, taking long walks between chapters to process the material and let ideas surface. I work like some painters do, blocking out a canvas, trying to understand how bits of the piece might work spatially within the whole. Only then do I start drafting complete sentences.

I wrote two or three polished drafts of this piece before submitting it, including a draft where I “un-weirded” it, trying to tell the story through a conventional linear narrative structure. That was a protracted, painful process, which confirmed to me that the material just didn’t want that shape. Eventually, I came to a point where I knew the piece needed something else, but I couldn’t see it. I sent it off to the Massachusetts Review almost like a message in a bottle, a desperate plea for help. To my lasting indebtedness, Shailja reached out to say that she saw something in it, too, and that she’d work with me. Her and Britt helped the piece grow into itself. I submitted eight more drafts within our “revising” period, about four of which I had labelled “final.” May every writer be so lucky as to find such generous, sharp-eyed editors. One of the larger ideas coming through in my Centralia project is that our seemingly private memories and experiences are bound up in larger collectives. So it feels really fitting—probably necessary—that this piece should enter the world through extensive collaboration.

How did you decide on the formatting for “Geographical Histories,” especially that of the farm-plot, timeline, and headings?

I had remembered reading Gertrude Stein’s Geographical History of America in graduate school and was fascinated by her idea of arranging narrative events as bounded shapes on a single plane, the same way that farming fields appear from above. I drew on Stein for initial inspiration and started to play around with other ways that history might be organized across space as well as within time. The headings are experiments with ways we might frame histories, suggesting that events circulate and recur rather than conclude. There can be so many headings, so many attempts to tell the story of every small town. History is far more about the telling of events than about the events themselves. We can never fully know the past. All of our attempts will ultimately fail, so we must continue to tell new stories.

What’s your favorite thing in or about Kansas?

I love the rolling hills of eastern Kansas and the way it feels to drive over them. You crest a hill and approach a horizon, then plunge into a new field. Because I come from a farming family and spent a lot of time in rural Indiana, I think fields are beautiful. I would guess that we have far more works of literature about mountains and bodies of water. I think the midwestern field is overdue for its moment.

Do you have any unpopular literary opinions or advice?

The best advice I ever got was from a fellow writer who read an early draft and told me to “go weirder.” She was right.

Some of the less useful advice I’ve gotten has urged me to put more “I” on the page, be more confessional, dig deep for a big emotional reveal. I definitely enjoy some books that follow that arc, but I’m also excited by writing that manages to be lodged within personal experience without being confessional. That’s my unpopular (possibly unhelpful) advice: tell the story that only you can tell, but don’t assume that the artistic truth is always within you.

What are you reading right now?

I’m one of those people who always has four or five books going at the same time. I’m trying to make up for gaps in my education by reading a lot of canonical geography and philosophy about how we assign meaning to places. I’m about four chapters into Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, two chapters into Kenneth Foote’s Shadowed Ground, and one chapter into Paul Ricouer’s Memory, History, Forgetting, which I’m taking two or three pages at a time. I’m maybe ten pages away from finishing W.G. Sebald’s incredible Austerlitz, which I wish I had read ten years ago so that I could have more time with it in my system. I don’t want that novel to end. Maybe I’ll never finish it.

JODI CRESSMAN is Professor of English at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. Her scholarly articles and books focus on the intersection of literature, medicine, and visual culture. Her creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, Terrain, Gordon Square Review, and others. She is an alum of the Kenyon Review and Bread Loaf writer’s workshops, and a former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently at work on a hybrid memoir about slow violence in American towns named Centralia.

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The 2026 FIFA World Cup was sold as a celebration of North American unity. Host governments promised growth, prestige and international visibility. The tournament arrives at a moment when North American integration itself appears increasingly fragile. Trade disputes, hardened borders, migration conflicts and growing distrust of public institutions have replaced the optimism that accompanied the original United Bid. The World Cup was conceived during an era that celebrated continental integration. It is being staged during one marked by fragmentation. Jennifer Hargreaves has long argued that sport should be understood not merely as entertainment but as a social institution through which wider struggles over power, exclusion and belonging are expressed. Football’s commercial transformation therefore matters not simply because the game has become more profitable, but because changes in its governance reshape access to one of the world’s most important cultural institutions.

Historian Amira Rose Davis reminds us that sport is never separate from struggles over labour, citizenship and belonging. And as Naomi Klein has argued, spectacles can obscure the political and economic arrangements that make them possible. The 2026 World Cup reveals precisely those arrangements and generates value not simply because people watch football, but because it converts cultural attachment into economic, political and reputational power.

Across Mexico, the United States and Canada, the tournament exposes three tensions at the heart of contemporary globalisation: development without equitable distribution, mobility without equal access, and growth without democratic control. Together, they illuminate not only the contradictions of North America but the changing political economy of football itself.

Mexico: Development for Whom?

Mexico has long been presented as a success story of North American integration. Yet many of the tensions surrounding the World Cup reflect a familiar question: who creates value and who captures it?

In Mexico City, community organisations have challenged redevelopment projects linked to the tournament, warning of pressure on water resources, rising property speculation and displacement. Their concern is not football itself but a model of development in which communities absorb social and environmental costs while economic benefits are concentrated elsewhere.

The cultural theorist Anamik Saha argues that contemporary cultural industries often transform local identities and histories into marketable assets while ownership and value remain concentrated in distant institutions. Football increasingly operates through a similar logic. Communities become part of the brand while rewards flow disproportionately towards broadcasters, sponsors, developers and governing bodies.

Relatives of Mexico’s nearly 135,000 disappeared persons have also used the World Cup spotlight to challenge official narratives of success, asking what it means to mobilise extraordinary resources for global visibility while thousands of families continue searching for answers.

For Zimbabwean sociologist Manase Chiweshe, football’s significance lies in the communities, memories and forms of belonging produced around it. That is precisely what many communities fear losing when the game becomes subordinate to commercial imperatives.

United States: Mobility for Some

If Mexico reveals the contradictions of development, the United States reveals the contradictions of mobility and deep hostility towards visitors.

The United States hosts the majority of matches and the tournament’s most lucrative commercial opportunities. Yet football’s celebration of global movement unfolds alongside heightened immigration enforcement, expanded security infrastructure and increasingly restrictive mobility regimes.

Sponsors, investors and media rights move across borders with ease. Migrants, asylum seekers and many ordinary people do not.

The geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued that contemporary systems of power distribute mobility, security and vulnerability unevenly. The World Cup reflects precisely that reality. It promises a borderless global community while operating within a world organised through permissions, checkpoints and exclusions.

The same contradiction appears inside the stadium. Escalating ticket prices and premium hospitality packages have transformed attendance into a luxury experience. Working-class communities that helped build football’s popularity increasingly encounter the game from outside the gates.

As Ben Carrington observes, sport often presents itself as universal while reproducing the inequalities of the societies in which it operates.

Canada: Sovereignty and Public Wealth

Canada reveals a third dimension of the story. The tournament takes place on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. The issue is not simply recognition but authority over land, development and the distribution of benefits generated by major projects.

In Vancouver, public authorities have committed substantial resources to tournament-related infrastructure and operations while taxpayers remain exposed to potential cost overruns. The debate therefore concerns who bears financial risk, who exercises decision-making authority and who receives long-term benefits.

Sports scholar Jules Boykoff’s concept of celebration capitalism is useful here. Mega-events create exceptional political moments in which public resources, corporate interests and extraordinary governance arrangements converge under the cover of spectacle. Public money frequently underwrites private gain while democratic scrutiny is softened by the language of national prestige. The Canadian case asks whether recognition alone is sufficient, or whether sovereignty must also include meaningful authority over development, land and the wealth generated from them.

FIFA and the Enclosure of Football

Across all three countries, a common thread emerges. The issue is not simply corruption but commercialisation. Football’s transformation mirrors broader shifts in global capitalism. As traditional avenues of growth have slowed, capital has increasingly turned towards culture, media, data, intellectual property and entertainment. Sport sits at the centre of that transition. Football is no longer valuable primarily because of ticket sales or matchday revenues. It generates value through broadcasting rights, sponsorship contracts, data analytics, gambling markets, merchandising, tourism, real estate development and the monetisation of global audiences. What is being sold is not simply a game, but attention, emotion, identity and belonging. In this sense, football has become part of what some political economists describe as an “experience economy“, where cultural attachment itself becomes a source of profit.

Historian David Goldblatt has documented how football evolved from workers’ clubs and neighbourhood institutions into one of the most profitable cultural industries on earth. FIFA increasingly resembles a transnational platform whose revenues depend overwhelmingly on broadcasting rights, sponsorships and hospitality products.

The question is no longer whether football generates profit. It is whether the priorities of profit increasingly determine how the game is organised, governed and experienced.

The Democratic Promise of the Game

Yet the World Cup also reveals why football continues to matter. Even nations that did not ultimately qualify reveal something important about football’s enduring significance. Palestine’s qualification campaign unfolded while Gaza was being devastated by genocide. Forced to play home fixtures in neutral venues and train across multiple countries, the team became a symbol of resilience under extraordinary circumstances. South Africa’s hosting of the Palestinian squad in 2024 underscored football’s capacity to serve not only as spectacle, but also as a vehicle for solidarity , recognition and compassion.

Some of the tournament’s most compelling stories belong to nations appearing on football’s biggest stage for the first time. Cabo Verde, a country of fewer than 600,000 people, qualified for its first World Cup after decades of perseverance. Uzbekistan became the first Central Asian nation to reach the finals. Jordan secured a historic first appearance.

For countries such as Cabo Verde, qualification is not simply a sporting achievement. It is an assertion of visibility within institutions historically organised around larger economies and greater resources. With a population under 600,000, it is one of the smallest countries ever to qualify for the World Cup. Its success was built not through enormous domestic resources but through decades of football development, diaspora networks and sustained investment in local talent. In a tournament increasingly defined by commercial scale and corporate value, Cabo Verde’s presence serves as a reminder that football’s appeal still rests on stories of collective aspiration rather than market power alone.

Cabo Verde forward Dailon Livramento captured that spirit: “Let’s have some fun. We got ourselves into the World Cup, now it’s time to have fun together.”

As Nana Adom-Aboagye argues, African experiences remain marginal within many global sporting conversations despite Africa’s central contribution to global sport. The growing presence of countries such as Cabo Verde challenges that marginality and reminds us that football’s future will not be written solely in Europe’s boardrooms or North America’s broadcast studios. African players and migrant communities continue to reshape global football far beyond the continent.

More Than a Tournament

The World Cup has become one of the clearest expressions of contemporary capitalism: a system capable of converting culture into capital, identity into brand value, attention into profit and belonging into economic opportunity.

As Manase Chiweshe reminds us, the value of football ultimately resides in those social worlds rather than the markets built around them. The challenge revealed by the 2026 World Cup is not simply how the game is governed, but whether the communities that give football meaning can continue to shape its future in an era increasingly defined by commercialisation, enclosure and extraction.

Dr. Lebohang Liepollo Pheko is an activist scholar and feminist political economist. She has roots in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zambia and works at the intersection of decolonial feminism, global political economy, and reparative justice. She analyses power and dispossession, viewing racial capitalism as a foundational entry point of contemporary dysfunction. Liepollo works in community with many social movements. Find her on Twitter/X at Liepollo9

Okay, so we’re ahead of the solstice by about a week. But after a week of New England humidity, we need every excuse to celebrate, and why not with the arrival of our summer issue! Featuring work from Caroline Monnet, a multidisciplinary artist of Anishinaabe and French ancestry, our issue features poems from Texas-born filmmakers and Chicago editors, stories and hybrid works from Atlantan nursing instructors and Kansas City bookstore owners, plus translations of K’iche Maya poets, Kashmiri storytellers, and much more, our stakes in literature stretch across geopolitical and historical borders.

Purchase a copy now!

You can find a few excerpts to read for free, plus Executive Editor Britt Rusert’s astute introduction, on our website. Whether its halftime during a World Cup match or quitting time after a long shift, a copy of MR Vol. 67, Issue 2 is the perfect company, so get your copy today!

One day recently, I sat down to teach my little sister, Marah, who is six years old. The lesson was about colors in English. But on the pages before us, I found that despite their names all the colors were printed in black. How will children learn the difference between colors when they are printed with black ink only?

“This is an ugly book, the stories from the bookshop are like the stars, I love them more, I don’t want my schoolbook,” said my little Marah.

She is not the only one to suffer from the disappearance of ink in Gaza.

It is well known that students in Gaza love knowledge and learning, and have a strong capacity for creativity and innovation. Even during genocide, they returned to studying and carried their notebooks and pens with determination. Now, with the approach of the high school exams for those born in 2008, the exams for West Bank students have been set and will be held in June. But the educational journey of Gaza students is severely threatened by the lack of ink and paper in the strip.

As assistant manager of an educational center for high school students, I see the daily difficulties our students face. Textbooks no longer resemble the ones I studied from. Now they are printed on flimsy paper, often without covers, entirely in black and white.

A teacher asks us to refill the whiteboard markers. We tell him that the remaining ink is not enough for the upcoming classes, and watch his face fall. “I don’t know how I will be able to explain to the students if the ink runs out, when there is no alternative, even chalk is not available,” says biology teacher Murad Al-Saei. He explains that biology requires colored images in order for the student to visualize and memorize. “How should the student understand the images attached to the text when they are printed without colored ink?” When printing prices skyrocketed, his biology handouts were converted from multi-colored images to black and white.

Al-Saei turns to his colleague Ziad Salem, an Arabic teacher, and says, “Even the smart screens that we used before the war are no longer available. Even one screen is not available, and if it is, we have no electricity or internet.”

Every day the teachers go searching for the small ink cartridges that might still be available. “What shall we do? Do we leave the students to fend for themselves?”

Al-Saei adds more: “Usually, the explanation of the lesson in the handout is one color, the questions are one color, and the answer is another color, so the study is familiar to the student. But now when everything is printed in black, the student takes more time or may not notice certain details.”

Israel wants this generation to be illiterate. It prevents ink and paper from entering Gaza in order to block our education. But we persevere, because Palestinians are devoted to science and knowledge.

High school and university students want to study with colors. In addition to dimming our books, Israel has reduced our city to shades of black and gray. We all need colored ink; it is crucial for our future.

My sister Marah still searches for the colors. She longs for yellow stars and bright flowers to return to our city and to the pages of her schoolbooks. With crayons and markers she and I try together to color her books, so she can complete her lessons.

Nadera Raied Mushtha is a writer and poet from Gaza studying English language education at the Islamic University of Gaza. Her writing has been published on The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Massachusetts Review, Prism Reports, The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Find Nadera on Instagram

A review of When We Are Kin: The History and Future of Afro-Indigenous Solidarity by Kyle T. Mays. Haymarket Books, 2026.

A book subtitled The History and Future of Afro-Indigenous Solidarity might be expected to open on a scene of communion. Kyle T. Mays opens instead on a scene of its breakdown. In the first few pages, Mays recounts his service on a Santa Monica task force in 2025 that was convened to address harms the city had done to its Black and Tongva communities (1), where the work of repair fractures almost immediately over who may claim Indigenous ancestry, whose injury counts as the worst, why Tongva land claims belonged in a conversation about Black redress, and whether solidarity is even the goal. Some people, Mays concludes, do not actually want to end white supremacy; they want a better seat at its table (5). It is a striking, almost perverse way to begin. But it is also the book’s thesis in miniature. Mays is not in the business of romanticizing Black and Indigenous kinship, or of mourning a solidarity some wish existed. He is interested in the difficult, contradictory, frequently fraught version that does exist. And he wants to know what solidarity might require of people already divided by racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, competing claims to injury, and a state that manages repair precisely so that it never threatens the order repair was meant to address.

That refusal to romanticize is the strongest current throughout When We Are Kin, and it marks the book’s distance from the hopeful coalition-talk it might easily have joined. Mays is a professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an Afro-Indigenous Saginaw Chippewa writer whose earlier book, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (2021), argued that the nation was founded through the linked processes of enslavement and dispossession. When We Are Kin picks up from a question the 2021 book left unanswered: when, exactly, did Black and Indigenous people actually unite against oppression? His answer reframes the premise. There are fewer moments than the question assumes, and the moments Mays can point toward historically tend to be brief and partial.

Mays documents some examples in his first chapter, “A Brief History of Black and Indigenous Solidarity,” including the Florida Seminole accepting self-emancipated Africans into their territories and communities, and then contrasts this with an 1823 treaty between the Seminole and the U.S. government, where an agreement is made that the Seminole will accept payment to return runaway slaves. In the late 1960s, Mays points out how some Indigenous activists worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists on the Poor People’s Campaign. He also turns to Kwame Ture’s support for Indigenous land claims. As Mays argues, no two oppressed groups are natural allies (11), even for Black and Indigenous peoples whose solidarity was built on racial-capitalist fault lines “from jump street” (12).

The book, therefore, shifts registers from historical recovery toward political theory, critique, and, finally, a manifesto. Its horizon is not policy but mino-bimaadiziwin, an Anishinaabe phrase Mays renders as “the good life” (8), not stable middle-class comfort while empire grinds on, but “an end to settler capitalism, a return of all Indigenous land, and an end to antiblack racism” (120). Repair, in other words, must mean more than the liberal state can offer.

The book moves through four compact chapters. The first surveys the history of Black-Indigenous solidarity and its limits, from Bacon’s Rebellion and the maroons of Spanish Florida to the Poor People’s Campaign, Kwame Ture’s advocacy for Indigenous land, and Black Lives Matter at Standing Rock. The second, on reparations, is the book’s analytic heart. The third extends the Land Back discourse into the city. The fourth gathers the argument into a vision of co-resistance and co-belonging. Readers of Mays’s earlier work will recognize several recurring concerns here, including the uneasy relation between Black freedom struggles and Indigenous dispossession. Their reappearance feels less like repetition than consolidation. Mays gathers a decade’s worth of thinking into one short, portable volume.

The book’s most original move is to turn reparations and Land Back against the property logic that underwrites both. In the second chapter, “Reparations: How Much Are Our Ancestors’ Bones Worth,” Mays reads the Black demand for land, from “forty acres and a mule” to the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Southern Homestead Act, as both just and historically grounded, while also structurally bound to Indigenous dispossession from the start, since the land on offer had already been seized from Native nations. He holds two truths together without flinching: the United States “had no right to exploit Black people on Indigenous land, and it had no right to give Black people land usurped from Indigenous peoples” (41).

His treatment of the loss and partial return of Bruce’s Beach is the chapter’s centerpiece. The 2021 return of that Manhattan Beach property to the Bruce family’s descendants—celebrated nationally as reparations achieved—becomes, in Mays’s reading, a parable of repair recaptured by capital. The Bruce family ultimately sold the land back to the county for some twenty million dollars, leaving the colonial property regime fully intact by recycling the “capitalist goals of justice” rather than ending the conditions that produced the theft. The sale also limits what could have been imagined for the land that was “beneficial to Black and Indigenous communities” (60), with the prior dispossession of the Gabrielino-Tongva acknowledged at the ceremony and then set aside (56–60). “Private property ain’t nothin but colonialism,” Mays writes, and that line is not a flourish but the chapter’s argument compressed (64). This is a genuine contribution to reparations debates, and a refusal of the cash-versus-land binary in favor of the harder question of whether justice can be built from conquest’s own materials at all.

The third chapter, “Landback and Indigenous Claims to Urban Territory,” performs the same operation toward Land Back and Indigenous sovereignty itself. Most Native people live in cities, Mays reminds us, yet much of the Land Back discourse fixates on rural and reservation lands. Mays wants urban land claims recognized as treaty land and as a site of return. He reads the displacement of Black and Mexican residents from Section 14 in Palm Springs—land held by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians—as evidence that tribal sovereignty itself can become, in his bracing phrase, “neoliberalism with an Indigenous face” (103). Sovereignty, he argues, “by itself is not radical” (100). This is the book at its most uncomfortable and most necessary. As the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians tribal council itself sought development and longer leases, the dispossession of poor Black tenants unfolded through, not against, the exercise of tribal sovereignty under conditions of domination (93–102). From this case, Mays refuses to treat the existing apparatus of sovereignty as automatically liberatory.

What elevates these chapters beyond mere critique is a firm rejection of the superficial vocabularies of “coalition” and “allyship.” Mays wagers that kinship, rather than alliance, constitutes the more durable form. This kinship, filtered through the Anishinaabe dodem clan system, is presented as a suite of obligations one actively assumes—including toward those newly arrived—rather than a passive sentiment one simply feels. The final chapter gathers these threads in “Toward Mino-Bimaadiziwin: Envisioning Black and Indigenous Co-Resistance and Co-Belonging,” where Mays asserts that tribal nations cannot truly decolonize within the United States, “the archetype of empire” (130). The constructive vision that follows draws on the Black radical tradition, from Huey P. Newton’s 1970 articulation of intercommunalism and decolonization, in which he argues that the world’s economies are so integrated into empire that a return “to the former conditions of existence” is foreclosed (129). Mays continues weaving these connections from Beatriz Nascimento’s quilombismo to Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on becoming good ancestors, into an explicitly open-ended program of “Eight Practices” and a seventeen-point manifesto he invites readers to revise: “a Google doc” rather than a blueprint (142). The goal is to translate critique into a usable, deliberately unfinished politics whose signature proposal is that Indigenous nations adopt their Black kin, doing the opposite of what slaveholding authorities once did.

It is worth saying plainly that the sovereignty critique is both the riskiest and perhaps the most necessary thing in the book, and it deserves a careful reading rather than a reflexive defense. Mays is not declaring Indigenous sovereignty meaningless. He is challenging whether sovereignty mediated through federal recognition, trust status, constrained jurisdiction, and capitalist development can be mistaken for decolonization itself. That distinction matters, and the book would be weaker without it. For anyone who has followed federal recognition battles, land-into-trust litigation, and the plenary power the United States still claims over Native nations, the critique is difficult to dismiss. And yet its very force raises a question the book does not fully resolve. If existing sovereignty is structurally compromised but remains materially indispensable—a hard-won shield for Native survivance—how should communities wield it as protection while refusing to mistake it for liberation? Mays gestures toward “the possibility of liberation, bubbling under the surface” (131), but the practical distance between an abolitionist horizon and the cases he has just analyzed is left, by design, for the reader to contemplate.

That same gap between horizon and transition opens widest in the book’s closing manifesto, seventeen points “for Black and Indigenous Reparatory Justice” offered, Mays says, in the mode of the Black Panthers’ Ten-Point Program and the 1972 Twenty Points. The manifesto is presented as a draft to argue with rather than a platform to ratify (142). It is the book at its boldest. The first demand, “Return the land. And I mean all of the land,” refuses the comfort of symbolic reconciliation and insists, in the spirit of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s argument that decolonization is not a metaphor, that repair cannot be reduced to curriculum, apology, or inclusion. The points that follow—abolishing racial capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism, the police, the carceral state, and patriarchy; reeducating the miseducated; providing free housing, care, and resources; undoing the borders of our minds and geographies, and more—are ethically forceful precisely because they decline to bargain. The manifesto’s force as a political horizon stems directly from its refusal to function as a finished program. For those committed to this vision, the text leaves us with the hard, practical labor of navigating land return, jurisdiction, and the messy realities of belonging under abolition. These are the very questions Mays declines to resolve, and in the book’s most expansive reading, that omission is the point. This manifesto is not meant to be a blueprint; it is a provocation to dream of reparatory justice at a scale that actually threatens to dismantle the order that required repair in the first place.

If the book has a productive opening rather than a flaw, it lies in the regional elaboration its national framework invites. And here I write from a particular positionality. As someone whose research concerns Black and Indigenous histories and reparative justice in southern New England, and who was raised in a Black and Wampanoag family on Cape Cod, I read When We Are Kin as both a national intervention and an invitation to think regionally. In southern New England, the histories of Mashpee, Aquinnah, Narragansett, Mohegan, Pequot, and other Indigenous peoples, braided with African diasporic communities through generations of intermarriage, maritime labor, shared land tenure, and racialized contests over recognition, show that Afro-Indigenous kinship is not only a matter of modern movement politics but of family, law, and survival across centuries. The Mashpee Wampanoag case is especially clarifying. In the long fight over federal recognition, opponents weaponized Black-Indigenous intermarriage as supposed evidence against Mashpee Indigeneity. And as recently as 2020, the federal government moved to disestablish the tribe’s reservation and remove its Mashpee and Taunton land from trust, a decision finally undone only after years of litigation. That history is a near-perfect illustration of Mays’s own insight that Black and Indigenous futures cannot be built through colonial racial logics that sever kinship from land, belonging from sovereignty, or repair from the structures that made dispossession possible. Future scholarship might extend his framework precisely into such places, where Blackness and Indigeneity have never been separable.

A word on style, since Mays insists we take it seriously. In a brief “Note on Writing,” he rejects the premise that scholarship must perform “proper English,” defends cursing and his “uncensored mode,” and credits Geneva Smitherman’s work on Black Language (7–8). His prose is not an accessory to the argument; it is part of the argument. The humor, profanity, direct address, and Black vernacular register refuse the fiction that political seriousness requires distance from ordinary speech, and at its best, the book reads like theory spoken across a kitchen table, a classroom, and activist meeting spaces at once. The same speed and intimacy that make it a pleasure to read can, however, compress the transitions between historical example, structural critique, and manifesto, leaving readers to supply some of the connective reasoning themselves. This happens most noticeably in the rapid vignettes of the first chapter and the schematic close of the last. This is a feature and a cost of the same choice, and Mays seems to accept the trade-off.

What When We Are Kin offers, finally, is not the resolution of its many tensions between abolition and the achievable, between sovereignty as shield and sovereignty as horizon, between the family memoir and the manifesto, but the insistence that we not resolve them prematurely. The book’s gift is that it makes the reader ask whether repair can ever mean more than compensation, inclusion, recognition, or property; whether kinship, rather than policy, might be the precondition for any justice worth the name. It belongs in conversation with the work of Tiya Miles, Alaina E. Roberts, Tiffany Lethabo King, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Robin D. G. Kelley, and it will reward scholars of Black and Indigenous studies even as it stays open to the general reader. That accessibility is not a lowering of stakes. It is Mays’s wager that the people who most need this argument should be able to hear it in their own voice.

Makhai Dickerson-Pells is a PhD candidate in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on Afro-Indigenous histories, Black and Indigenous reparative justice, Land Back, and reparations in southern New England. A Mashpee Wampanoag citizen raised on Cape Cod, he works at the intersection of Black studies and Indigenous studies, tracing how kinship, land tenure, and recognition have bound African diasporic and Native communities across the region’s history.

The robe hangs from me
like a dark green river
that has traveled
through iron gates,
through winters of counting,
through the long vocabulary of restriction.

And now—

see how the old cathedral light
cannot help itself.
It pours over my shoulders
as if the morning itself
had been waiting
for this walk.

Seventy-six years old
and still the heart
opening like a wildflower
through a crack in stone.

Who told us
that life blooms only once?
Who decided
the soul cannot begin again
after ruin?

I step forward carefully,
not because I am weak,
but because I know
what it costs
to arrive anywhere beautiful.

The young students glance at me
and perhaps they see resilience.
But resilience is too small a word.

I am more like the oak tree
that lightning split decades ago
yet each spring
insists on leaves.

More like the river
that prisons tried to name and contain,
yet still found its way
to open water.

And listen—
the silent organ rising in the chapel,
the old stones holding their breath,
the tassel brushing my cheek
like the hand of time itself saying:

Yes.
Even now.
Especially now.

My diploma is not paper.

It is a door swinging wide
in the middle of my life.

It is every book read under fluorescent light,
every lonely night survived,
every stubborn hope
protected like a candle in wind.

I walk saucily down the aisle,
smiling as though astonishment
has finally become a form of prayer.

And the world,
which has taken so much from me,
must now make room

for the woman
who came back alive.

Patty Prewitt spent nearly 40 years incarcerated for a crime she did not commit. She was released in December 2024 and has published two memoirs and a children’s book. She lives near Kansas City and advocates for prisoners’ rights. Her story “Killing Me” appeared in our Winter 2025 Issue on Incarceration & Family. Linktree https://linktr.ee/pattyprewitt

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.
-Wallace Stevens, “Fabliau of Florida”

Where the pelicans glide overhead
And the whitecaps foam up like beer heads,
There’s a cold one for you.
Try a Florida brew
By the shore with your beach blanket spread.

1
Keep this Fish Camp Pils chilled within reach
For your revelries down on the beach.
Crisp and light-hopped hydration
Pair well with vacation
(And seagulls that quibble and screech).

2
Here’s a Dragon Point waiting for you
That’s hop-forward with citrus notes, too.
It’s a West Coast gone East
Made with hop-boosting yeast
For a tasty and tongue tingling brew.

3
Do Beach Blondes have more fun where there’s sand?
That depends on the Brown Ales at hand.
Try this Duke’s: smoothly malty
For days when the salty
Sea air and the sun leave you tanned.

TASTING NOTES:
Fish Camp Pils Pilsner Lager. Veterans United Craft Brewery. Jacksonville, FL. 4.8% ABV.
This beer pours pale gold with a light white head and mild carbonation. Its crisp cleanness skims easily across your tongue, with a refreshing hoppy finish and just a hint of cereals. Pairs well with Florida afternoons.

Dragon Point IPA. Intracoastal Brewing Co. Melbourne, FL. 6.5% ABV.
Pours with a translucent lemony glow and a foamy white head. This IPA’s mouthfeel is on the light side, but the spunky hop profile parks delish bittery flavors in the middle of your tongue. There are hints of piney and grapefruit in the finish. Leaves a trace of lace in your glass.

Duke’s Cold Nose Brown Ale. Bold City Brewery. Jacksonville, FL. 5% ABV.
Pours mahogany brown with a creamy beige head and medium-malty aroma. The mouthfeel tilts toward thin for a smooth ride as this ale conveys a mild, flavorful maltiness that doesn’t go roasty or nutty. A near-crushable Brown, but why not let the malts linger between sips?

Marsha Bryant writes about literature, culture, and craft beer. Her recent essays appear in The Poetry of Bob Dylan, Creativity in the Classroom, and The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath. Marsha taught for many years at the University of Florida. Her Untappd handle is LimerickLady.

Recently, I joined a group of volunteers who write to immigrant detainees in Otay Mesa Detention Center. A quiet kind of connection that forms when I write to someone I may never meet—someone whose world has been reduced to walls, routines, and long stretches of waiting. Writing to detainees is, on the surface, a small act: putting pen to paper, choosing words carefully, sealing an envelope. Yet within that simplicity lies something deeply human and unexpectedly powerful.

This understanding is not abstract for me. I was incarcerated for nearly four decades. I know firsthand how time can stretch, how isolation can settle in, and how easily a person can begin to feel invisible. In that environment, even the smallest gesture from the outside world can carry immense weight. A letter is never just only a letter—it is a lifeline. It interrupts the monotony. It reminds detainees that they are still seen, still heard, still part of a broader human community. When I was incarcerated and heard from a stranger, I was comforted to know that anyone outside my family cared. When I received a photo, I eagerly examined it for details from the free world. That’s why I send pictures with my letters.

The first person I wrote to in Otay was a young African woman. I celebrated when she was freed earlier this year on a habeas petition after six weeks of confinement. Now, I’m sending letters to young man from eastern Europe. I feel close to him because I have grandsons his age.

When I write to him and other detainees, I sit with the reality of another person’s circumstances and try to meet them, however briefly, with kindness and respect. I receive no immediate reward, no guarantee of a response, and often no clear sense of the letter’s impact. And yet, that is part of what makes it meaningful to me. It is an act of giving without expectation.

In a world that often emphasizes grand gestures and visible outcomes, writing to detainees reminds me that small, consistent acts of care matter. A single letter may not change a system, but it can change a moment. It can offer comfort on a difficult day, provide a sense of dignity, or simply break the silence. These are not insignificant things. They weren’t for me.

Writing a letter does not erase injustice or undo hardship but it does affirm our common bond. It says, in essence, “You are not alone.” Therefore, I am not alone, either. It becomes less about “helping” in a conventional sense and more about connection—about showing up, consistently and sincerely, in whatever way I can. Presence, even in the form of words on a page, has value.

As I prepare to write to the young man from eastern Europe again, I think of when my kids were young. We hosted foreign exchange students to show that people are more alike than different. Having lived through years of incarceration, I understand the profound impact that even a single act of kindness can have. That knowledge makes each letter I write feel purposeful. It is not just outreach—it is a way of giving back something that once meant everything to me. A single letter becomes something much larger: a bridge between lives, a gesture of shared humanity, and a reminder that even the smallest acts of kindness can ripple outward in meaningful ways.

Patty Prewitt spent nearly 40 years incarcerated for a crime she did not commit. She was released in December 2024 and has published two memoirs and a children’s book. She lives near Kansas City and advocates for prisoners’ rights. Her story “Killing Me” appeared in our Winter 2025 Issue on Incarceration & Family. Linktree https://linktr.ee/pattyprewitt

A review of We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers (New Directions, June 2025)

We Are Green and Trembling (2025), Robin Myers’s award-winning English translation of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s latest novel Las niñas del naranjel (2023) has already received significant international recognition, winning the 2025 National Book Award for Best Translation and earning a place on the longlist for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

At the center of the novel stands Antonio de Erauso—born Catalina de Erauso—the historical Basque explorer and conquistador who escaped a Spanish convent where he had been raised as a little girl and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of adventure and reinvention. However, We Are Green and Trembling is less interested in heroic conquest than in memory, remorse, and the tangled afterlives of colonialism, as Antonio must help Mitãkuña and Michī, two young enslaved Guaraní girls, regain health and find their families. Through Antonio’s retrospective narration, the text reconstructs the colonial encounter not as a triumphal epic but rather as fragmentation: a world of overlapping voices, competing cosmologies, and irreparable violence.

In addition to emulating the English cadences of the late-sixteenth century, Myers’s translation preserves expressions in Guaraní, Latin, and Basque from the source text, developing a striking linguistic polyphony already familiar to readers of Cabezón Cámara’s other works. The result is a textual environment where multiple languages and registers coexist: the girls’ expressions in Guaraní, Antonio’s letter of atonement to his aunt, the Latin of biblical references, old Basque songs, and literary allusions ranging from Don Quijote to The Little Prince. Even the flora and fauna of the Misiones region of present-day Northeastern Argentina register their own forms of language through sensory imagery:

They melt into each other. They form a mountain that becomes a spring, bathing the brush in ferns and hummingbirds and caimans and little blue frogs, and they transform once more into two daughters with their mother. (189)

Sounds, smells, and tactile feelings blur the distinction between human and non-human experience. Friends, enemies, plants, and animals alike coalesce within the dense jungle environment through which Antonio moves and remembers. Like the vines intertwining around them, the novel’s multiplicity of narratives and registers wrap around one another to create a textured and immersive reading experience.

The novel operates across multiple genres. At its core, we find an epistolary structure, as Antonio writes a letter to his aunt while reflecting on his life and actions. Simultaneously, the text adopts the form of a colonial chronicle, recounting encounters in the New World from the perspective of a remorseful colonizer vis-à-vis the unexamined gruesome violence retold from the perspective of colonial authorities. Layered onto these forms are genesis narratives: the Christian creation story is told alongside the Guaraní creation story. The coexistence of these traditions destabilizes the singular worldview historically imposed by colonial discourse, and, instead, the novel foregrounds a plurality of origins and ways of understanding the world.

In terms of its formal elements, the novel is equally ambitious in its handling of time. Its multi-temporal narrative weaves together Antonio’s present act of letter writing, the events that led him to compose the letter, memories of his girlhood in the convent, his passage across the Atlantic, and the perspectives of the Bishop and his men as they enact brutal violence against Indigenous peoples, animals, and the environment itself. The result is a narrative in which past and present constantly merge into one another, suggesting that colonial violence cannot be confined to a finished historical moment but rather that it continues to reverberate across time and space.

Ultimately, We Are Green and Trembling participates in what I like to call subaltern historical fiction: fictional narratives grounded in historical events but told from the perspective of actors whose voices and/or actions are excluded from official history. In this sense, the novel enters into conversation with classics such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), as well as more contemporary works likeThe Moor’s Account (2014) by Laila Lalami, which reimagines the Narváez expedition of Florida through the perspective of Estebanico, the first Black explorer, erased from the colonial archive, or Jaime Manrique’s Our Lives Are the Rivers (2006). The novel also resonates with The Adventures of China Iron, Cabezón Cámara’s widely acclaimed feminist retelling of José Hernández’s Martín Fierro, which I reviewed for the MR Blog back in 2020 as well. Like that earlier work, We Are Green and Trembling interrogates the myths underpinning national and colonial histories, but it does so through a darker and more fragmented meditation on guilt, gender, language, and the will to survive.

Manuela Borzone is assistant professor of Spanish at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2021.

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