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Arts in Society

Arts in Society brings our poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism into a common project. It focuses on how the arts—including the literary and visual arts, music, theater, dance, and film—can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns, from racism, inequality, and poverty to sex- and gender-based violence, democratic backsliding, and a collapsing natural world.

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Poetry

Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits

Terrance Hayes
Poetry

Two white men carrying briefcases walk in on a congressional meeting held by African leaders dressed in Western attire. Clapping at the president who resembles Léopold Senghor. He uses words like “revolutionary” and “independence” and they garner an applause.

Cheswayo Mphanza

Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.

Ed Pavlić
Poetry
Kristin Emanuel

even the long-gone
once knew tenderness.

Fiction
Swati Prasad

“We were idyllic in our isolation.”

Fiction
Parashar Kulkarni

“In the East, it is the cow that animalizes the man. Hence, the native occupies this intermediate space between man and beast, which we term ‘savage.’”

Poetry
Meghana Mysore

shouting / the same words but in different languages

Poetry
Ben Doller

there is nothing but performance; the language that stretches to capture us all

Poetry
Evaristo Rivera

I begin to feel my body rise / and I can believe / in what freedom must feel like.

Poetry
Sandra Simonds

To not have had the luxury to think “the world is over,” but to feel it instead.

Poetry
Alexis V. Jackson

My grandmother tells me she loved you fiercely
in the way she reaches for me when your name
is spoken.

Robin D. G. Kelley

Thelonious Monk lost (and found) in Paris.

Poetry
Njoku Nonso

The stones are endlessly weeping in the dark. Or is it
the bird-chatter of rain. O darling, are you writing
another poem about trees? No, not trees but ghosts
that live on trees and their legend of never-let-gos.

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Andrew Spieldenner
Kiese Laymon

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Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University.

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