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Arts in Society

Arts in Society brings our previously siloed poetry and fiction—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a common project. It focuses on how the arts—including the visual arts, theater, dance, and film—can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns, including racism, inequality, poverty, demagoguery, sex- and gender-based violence, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.

Arts in Society

Mother, Grow My Baby

Winner of the Fall 2019 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest.

Sabrina Helen Li

Poetry

I think of
Him minutes from
Home a bag
Of Skittles the
First man to
Be accused of
Using the sidewalk
As a weapon

Kelly’s Love for Waltzes

Arts in Society

Elizabeth Hand’s Curious Toys

Celebrated novelists John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand discuss Hand’s new novel and the ways that historical fiction can and cannot answer our questions about the past.

John Crowley, Elizabeth Hand

Arts in Society

The Historian’s Art

After retiring from Princeton, celebrated historian Nell Irvin Painter decided to go to art school. In this interview with Walter Johnson, she discusses what it’s like to be an old student, and how art lets her tell truths about history that she couldn’t as an academic.

Jonathan M. Square, Walter Johnson, Nell Painter

Arts in Society

The Bird at the Window

Since 1970 North America has lost 29 percent of its bird population. New York City alone kills almost a quarter of a million birds each year. More than most people, poets have tried to respond to these unremarked—and mostly preventable—deaths.

Arts in Society

Herman Melville the Poet

The author of Moby Dick is best known for his novels, but he devoted the second half of his life to writing poetry. What can a new Complete Poems teach us about his place in the canon of American letters?

Gillian Osborne

Arts in Society

Walks in the Park: On the Foreignness of the Socialist Past

December 22 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the overthrow of the Romanian socialist state of Nicolae Ceaușescu. In a work of memoir, Nachescu recalls growing up under communism and wonders about the world Romanians hoped would follow its fall.

Ileana Nachescu

Arts in Society

AI’s Human Problem

Two new books about machine creativity mostly reveal how little appreciation we still have for the full range of human creativity.

Alexis L. Boylan

Arts in Society

László Krasznahorkai’s Catastrophic Harmonies

The winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature serves up an apocalyptic vision of Hungarian society.

Poetry

I opened the blinds
and a pack of white women
were wailing down Maple,
crying into potholes

Undelivered Message to the Sky: November 9, 2016

Arts in Society

To the Fordham

In a pre-Giuliani New York where pornographic theaters create communities of dissimilar people, a young blue-collar worker and a homeless ex-con forge a connection through their shared enjoyment of public sex.

Samuel R. Delany

Arts in Society, Race

Ally: From Noun to Verb

Robin D. G. Kelley talks with musician Vijay Iyer about systems of oppression, the responsibility of artists, and how jazz sells proximity to blackness to white people.

Robin D. G. Kelley, Vijay Iyer

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