Category: Admin

Sundress Reads: Review of Gravity & Spectacle

Half-photography and half-poetry, Gravity & Spectacle is the killer combo that you didn’t know you needed. This collection is a truly cinematic experience made possible by a collaboration between self-professed college dropout and poet Shawnte Orion and Asian American poet and photographer Jia Oak Baker, both based in Arizona. This work seeks to make sense of its atmosphere: at times thick and suffocating, at others, colorful and intriguing. These pieces work in cohesion, like the cogs of a turning, anti-capitalist wheel, in order to critique the world in which they find themselves. As Orion writes: “we will begin by taking scissors to the strings of kites” (55).

The first half of this collection—Gravity—is filled with Baker’s photos, often featuring metropolitan locales or arid dustbowls, where light and contrast set the tone at every stage. What’s most striking is the central figure, the same in each photograph, a man (presumably Orion from interviews given), wearing a gigantic mask on his head. This almost Orwellian mask, created by Phoenix artist J.J. Horner, resembles something between a many-eyed octopus behemoth, or a mutant saguaro. Saguaros and Arizona’s Sonoran Desert feature prominently in both these photos and Orion’s own lines in the second half of the book: Spectacle. Even urban Arizona becomes some recast version of this barren wilderness: “the official / State Bird of Arizona / is the Ceiling Fan” (46). The masked figure becomes a looming presence, both speaker and spectator as the reader moves back and forth between image and lyric.

Certainly, these connections are distinct and vibrant. In Baker’s “Elliptical Proximity,” the masked figure takes a selfie at a fairground, mid-air with just a few inches of himself in the frame, a disconnected father and son in the background, lit by brightly colored bulbs that juxtapose a sense of American nostalgia beside many of the more muted photographs (29). This same photograph is nodded to in Orion’s poem “You’ve Gone Supernova but Nothing Burns Brighter Than Itself,” where he alludes to the discovery of Neptune: “like how the presence of other people in your elliptical proximity is the only way to understand that you are alone” (56). Many of the poems contain winks, nudges, and nods to the images that precede them.  There is something both cheeky and somber about Baker and Orion’s united perspective.

Orion’s poems are as close to punk rock as we can get in 2021. When he isn’t taking shots at a certain former president—“Make Orwellian Dystopia Science Fiction Again (79)”—he’s unspooling social and class commentary: “a guide to which fifty states in America / women who care about their rights should avoid / ranked in no particular order” (64). This collection is witty and wry even as it is biting. In a piece where the speaker wonders about the flat earth conspiracy, Orion grounds us in reality, back to blue-collar workers and the mundanity of the everyday: 

My supervisor still believes
the earth is flat and we fall
off the edge every night
when we clock out (59)

It is the outliers who are the key players for Orion and Baker. The reader cannot take their eyes away from the masked stranger in the grayscale laundromat (18) or under the lit-up letterboard at Phoenix’s Rebel Lounge (5). With short clipped consonant sounds that call to mind the grinding skaters who are dotted throughout these pages (perhaps pro-boarder Rodney Mullen, whose name and words crop up once or twice) as well as piled-on metaphors that are somehow both sumptuous and gritty, every Arizonian doldrum is made sharp, funny, and irreverent.

Should you read this collection? If not for the strangeness of Baker’s composition, or Orion’s “Desert Tarot Six-Card Spread”—first in Spanish and then in English—that so perfectly recalls that familiar, rehearsed mystic phrasing, then do it for those striking, heartbreaking moments tucked away amidst the cleverly virgule-d prose poems:

don’t wait for second responders / like you waited for dad to return
from the bar with that elusive gallon of milk / like you waited
for mom’s hair and smile / to return from the oncologist’s office
don’t wait for the world to stop spinning (53)

You might end up with repetitive strain injury after flipping back and forth so often to search for the photographs that link to the poems you’re immersed in. You’ll find yourself unable to forget that alien-headed man under the fairground lights. Orion writes that “The eye is the quickest muscle” (49). It’s clear that in Gravity and Spectacle, perspective is everything. 

Gravity and Spectacle is available at Tolsun Books

Shannon Wolf is a British writer and teacher, living in Louisiana. She is currently a joint MA-MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. She is the Non-Fiction Editor of The McNeese Review and Social Media Intern for Sundress Publications. She also holds an MA in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction (which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby) have appeared in The Forge and Great Weather for Media, among others. You can find her on social media @helloshanwolf.

Project Bookshelf: Lee Anderson

I once organized my aunt’s library room by color when I helped her move, sweeping ROY G BIV around black shelves and bubble-wrapped packages I was expressly warned not to touch, much to her irritation. I was young, so I didn’t quite understand how or why that might be annoying, but now that I have bookshelves of my own to place, it makes more sense. I have three wide rows of a living-room-turned-office bookshelf that I share with my girlfriend sorted by genre: notebook, cookbook, scientific nonfiction, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. In a perfect world, each genre would be organized by the author’s last name, but I once forgot how many letters are in the alphabet while I was teaching, so that dream hasn’t been realized just yet. For the most part, this system works. I do love that most of the books I’ve found and adore have brightly-colored covers. They are little gems, bright pops of jewel tones nestled together like the world’s best literary supermarket.

Most of my favorite fiction novels have been passed down to my youngest sister, a bookworm after my own heart, but I’ve kept a few close to me—a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s best gifted to me by my childhood best friend, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz—and am regrowing my collection as I stumble upon more. I’m always trying to find and read more creative nonfiction, and gems like Sarah Minor’s Bright Archives that play with form are what keep me going as I test out my own form-based experiments in essays. My sort-by-genre system has been falling apart the more I learn about and invest in non-traditional literature, however. Where does a hybrid chapbook go? What about an essay collection that braids pedagogy with real science? If it exists outside of formal constraints, does it have a home? I don’t have a solution for this yet, as silly as that sounds. I’ve been trying to make gradients between genres, like one big loop, where teal fits between green and blue, and it’s both working and not.

To the right of my desk, opposite the big bookshelf, are two floating shelves. My “academic bookshelf” lives on the bottom. This is where I keep books that I’m actively reading (Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel Lavery) that aren’t on my bedside table (currently The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang), composition and rhetoric books I’m teaching, and books that I need for my own MFA classes. Right now, most of these books are for my thesis—Queer Phenomenology, Pale Blue Dot, Assuming a Body, and more—whether I am drawing inspiration from their form, style, or simply trying to wrap my head around the theory. The “dog” plant pot and tiny hand are for keeping the books upright and me smiling, a simultaneous bookend and serotonin slot machine. The shelf above keeps my mug collection in one place, because what is an office corner if not also a coffee station? I use my mugs as decor, in teaching my freshmen about twisting genre and tone, and for their standard purpose as drink vessels. If I think about it hard enough, they become part of my bookshelf gradient, tying the corners together by wrapping up all of my loose ends.

I keep two books on my desk with my darling marble queen pothos, color-coordinated calendar, and peach rings always in reach. Despite not being a poet, the beauty of poetry is so concentrated that it is my favorite way to re-inspire myself. Mary Oliver is one of my all-time favorites, and her anthology Devotions has enough familiar and new material that opening to a random page, reading the poem(s), and sitting with the images for a few moments is enough fuel to keep me going on long nights. I’ve done this recently with torrin a. greathouse’s new release Wound from the Mouth of a Wound and Clementine von Radic’s Mouthful of Forevers, too.

If poetry can’t save my writing brain when the wiring is faulty, though, my tarot cards can. I have a deck themed after the 2013 movie Pacific Rim, each card painted by a different artist, and take a moment, shuffling them through my hands, staring up at my big bookshelf until it feels right. I draw a card, read the interpretation from Michelle Tea’s fantastic Modern Tarot, and watch how adjusting the placement of my perspective gives me the opportunity to try again.

Lee Anderson is a nonbinary MFA student at Northern Arizona University, where they are the managing editor of Thin Air Magazine. They have been published sporadically but with zest, with work appearing or forthcoming in The Rumpus, Columbia Journal, and Back Patio Press.

Meet Our New Intern: Claire Shang

I grew up reading and writing at any chance. From my first memorable encounter with the written word—my first grade hands clumsily flipping through Valerie Worth’s All the Small Poems—I knew, but couldn’t yet express, the magical potency of poetry. 

As I went through high school, what guided me was writing poems about my personhood and journalistic articles about my surroundings. Both modes of writing grounded me in their own ways, allowing me to safely negotiate a new environment and my ever-changing relationship to it. I was lucky enough to find others who wanted to hold onto that same feeling, meeting them at summer workshops like those at Kenyon and Sewanee, as well as literary organizations and magazines, both on-campus and in the real world.

A breakthrough moment for me came recently, in realizing that my interests in creative writing and longer-form writing were not mutually exclusive. Instead, I’m interested in how this work informs each other, how language both describes but also helps shape our realities.

To me, writing has always been a reminder of plurality—a small way to reflect the world’s wholeness. I like to think of writing as a dispatch from a new, self-created space. That’s why publications feel so sacred; they serve as an embodiment of this space, enclosing and protecting the world generated by words. For that reason, I’m so looking forward to this opportunity with Sundress, to continue understanding the role of writing in my life, and conversely, the contributions I can give back to the literary community.

Claire Shang is a freshman at Columbia University, where she is an editor with The Columbia Review. She is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a reader of mostly everything. Her work has appeared in or been recognized by Peach Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and Smith College.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Studies of Familiar Birds by Carrie Green

After the Diagnosis

Hontoon Island State Park, DeLand, Florida

We walked the hammock to the shell mound,
my father first on the hard-packed path.
Shadows of palms and oaks slanted like rungs,
the path a shining ladder through trees.

My father led us on the hard-packed path,
head down, sharp elbows swinging. Did he see
the path shining like a ladder through trees?
We followed him through the hush of fronds.

Head down, sharp elbows swinging, did he see
the red lichen bloom like cells on trunks of trees?
We followed him through the hush of fronds
and the trunks’ stains, bright as open wounds.

The lichen bloomed like cells on trunks of trees.
The sabal palms curved and leaned,
their red stains bright as open wounds.
Trail ends here. We needed to be told.

A sabal palm curved and leaned
into the wide arms of a dead oak.
Trail ends here. We needed to be told.
The midden sinks into swampy ground.

This selection comes from Studies of Familiar Birds, available from Able Muse Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Carrie Green’s book, Studies of Familiar Birds, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press in December 2020. She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Flyway, Blackbird, Cave Wall, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky, and works as a reference librarian in a public library.

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Summertime Fine by Jason B Crawford

Untitled (Mufa)

Somewhere there is a river
full of dead things, asking me
when I will be added to their
collection. My answer is
always the same, I’m waiting
to be enough soil to sprout
flowers. A garden of
geraniums bellowing from my
chest. I can’t just be a list of
black names we write on
picket signs and t-shirts,
something must grow here.
Surely I was not put on this
earth simply to die.

This selection comes from Summertime Fine, available from Variant Literature. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

JASON B. CRAWFORD (He/They) is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC,
raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press,
Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. He is also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has his Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University.

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
 

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents: “[B]e prostrate / be praise”: Writing the Self Sacred & Profane

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present this generative workshop focusing on poetry of the self led by Leah Silvieus on February 10th, 2021 from 6-7:30PM EST. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress, with the password ‘safta.’

In this generative poetry workshop, which takes its title from a line in Eric Tran’s poem “How to Pray,” we will consider how what we might consider “sacred” and “profane” can provide entryways into thinking about our selves’ relationship to our identities, to other people, and to the divine or supernatural (however one conceives of them). We will look toward contemporary poets such as Tran and others as guiding lights as we work through linked writing prompts that will navigate us through the generative space that opens up among the contending forces of the sacred/profane, belief/disbelief and religious texts/rituals and their subversions/re-imaginings.

Over the course of this workshop, we will think together through questions such as, “How do poets use the profane to access the sacred and vice-versa?” “What is the relationship between the two?” “How does poetry work to draw/re-draw or dissolve boundaries between them?” At the end of the workshop, participants will emerge with a vibrant first poem draft that travels the strange space between the sacred and profane in their own poetic imaginations. Find the poems for this workshop online here.

While there is no fee for this workshop, those who are able and appreciative can make direct donations to the leader via Venmo (@Leah-Silvieus).

Leah Silvieus (she/her) is the author most recently of the poetry collection Arabilis and is the co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami and has awards and fellowships from The National Book Critics Circle, Fulbright, and Kundiman. Her criticism has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Believer, and elsewhere. She is currently based in New Haven where she is studying literature and religion at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.  

Project Bookshelf: Eliza Browning

My bookshelf is an assorted jumble of the books I’ve accumulated throughout the years from a variety of different sources, representing my shifting tastes and needs through high school and college. A revolving collection split between my home bookcases and my dorm room shelves, my books often undergo frequent purges and additions to compensate for limited space. Borrowed library books, a few old favorites, novels for English classes, and textbooks for my art history major crowd the mantel I use for storage in my dorm, while the rest of my books live year-round in two bookcases at home.

At the end of high school, I purged my bookshelf of most of my children’s lit and young adult books, saving my favorites and donating the rest to Little Free Libraries or my mother’s high school classroom. I retained my favorite books, some which were presents, and literary classics needed for my English major, many of which I inherited from the college collections of my mother and grandmother. I buy most of my books secondhand from the Internet or local used bookstores, which allows me to save money and buy more while purchasing books for class or pleasure. I also collect nineteenth-century books with embossed covers, many of which I find in antique stores or at the Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.

Many of my books have come to me by chance, gifted by friends and relatives, foraged from Little Free Libraries, or stolen from unused piles once owned by family members. Before leaving college, one of my friends gifted me almost his entire collection of philosophy and classics, dog-eared and coffee-stained. My collection ranges from classics to contemporary, poetry to nonfiction, theory to memoir, textbooks and Andy Steves’ Europe: City-Hopping on a Budget. I hope to one day have space for my own library in my future house or apartment, allowing my book collection to further expand and grow.

Eliza Browning is a student at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, where she studies English and art history. Her work has previously appeared in Rust + Moth, Vagabond City Lit, Contrary Magazine, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among others. She is a poetry editor for EX/POST Magazine and reads poetry for COUNTERCLOCK Journal.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Summertime Fine by Jason B Crawford

black like

i am black like all things black
wanted for everything but the flesh
noise to anything arrhythmic
an ankle of gold shackled to an ankle of gold
the skin rubbing to flake off ash
letting something of the name be free
but ain’t all skin dead once left homeland
ain’t all tongues a north star until dimmed
a boy with a taste for the river
but yet in fear of any body of water
that he can’t spit out

This selection comes from Summertime Fine, available from Variant Literature. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

JASON B. CRAWFORD (He/They) is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC,
raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press,
Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. He is also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has his Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University.

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.
 

Lyric Essentials: féi hernandez Reads Natalie Diaz

Welcome back to Lyric Essentials! This week, Sundress author féi hernandez reads Natalie Diaz for us while reflecting beautifully how it feels to experience, write, read, and become poetry. Thank you for reading!

Erica Hoffmeister: Why did you choose to read Natalie Diaz for Lyric Essentials?

féi hernandez: When I finished reading Natalie Diaz’ “When My Brother was an Aztec” I had an otherworldly impulse to turn back to the title page and two inches beneath the title write: “Natalie Diaz is God and I’m dead in her heaven.” I went to my room from the living room and put my sneakers on and went out for a run, I wanted to fly. With the statement I wrote didn’t mean to aggrandize or over sensationalize a fellow spell casting poet, nor do I not see the God in myself or in other writers that have changed me like Danez Smith or Patricia Smith or Ocean Vuong, but it was heavenly to find a place to rest, one where I could always be safe and be clearly seen. Every poem struck my bones like precise lightning, electrifying my spirit to write. I had finally found tracks that could teach me to be a better hunter and simultaneously prey. Natalie Diaz unfurls, demystifies a lot of the usually tangled or overgeneralized notions of identity, which is what my work is determined to do. Specificity. Through Natalie Diaz’ work I felt closer to my ancestors, I felt my voice more capable of bringing them to life through my written word. Every poet, new and old, needs to experience the work of Natalie Diaz.

féi hernandez reads “Blood Light” by Natalie Diaz

EH: What connection do you have to the particular poems that you chose to read?

fh: “Blood-Light” reminded me of internal and external turmoil I’ve experienced with my own family and interestingly, with myself. I am “brother” to myself in this poem as much as I am the narrator whose words/ alacranes, “In them is what stings in me – / it brings my brother to the ground,” in this case “brother” is my family. The way light and darkness works in this piece reminds me of the flick-of-the-light combustion that erupts in these moments of contention where, “The only light left is in the scorpions – / there is a small light left in the knife too.” This flash of war happens in 14 couplets. Couplets: love, family, ties, commitment, and togetherness all amidst the falling apart, the violence, the hurt. The last couplet destroys me: “One way to open a body to the stars, with a knife. / One way to love a sister, help her bleed light.”

As for “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” all I will state are two very long things: 1. Aside from the title taking up its well deserved smarts and space, the first line sets up the poem perfectly: “ Angels don’t come to the reservation.” 2. The dichotomy of the reservation/ native land and the outsider, intrusive Anglican colonizers are pit against against each other over and over. For example: Saint Gabriel and Gabe, an Indian who stays in the reservation after a POWOW who “Sure he had wings, / jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars. / Wherever he stops, / kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies.” What matters here is Gabe, his life, and not some “white god”/ angel who was part of the history of destruction bestowed upon the world, but in this case the reservation. My favorite line of the poem is “You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, / they’ll be marching you off to / Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out / for us.” Clearly tying this all back to violent histories in the United States and warning their people to avoid any “angels,” the colonizers they are. This poem specifically grounds me in the work I aspire to create which can capture the historical tensions not just in content, but in the decisions I make in the writing, like foiling concepts and characters and what they represent.

féi hernandez reads “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” by Natalie Diaz

EH: Diaz’ has said that myth, to her, is—in contrast to written histories—“the truest of truths.” You too, write about myth and identity, particular to your nonbinary, non-white, radical immigrant experience. Can you speak to your relationship with myth and truth in this vein?

fh: The spiritual blends right in with myth. I grew up with so many stories that were supposed to instill fear in me like La Llorona, or highway spirits, or tales of the devil, but to me they felt the closest to my own truth: being trans, non-binary, being a childhood arrival from Chihuahua, México, growing up in Inglewood, Spanish my first tongue, and being displaced from so much: first the land and people I was born from (Pi’ma, Tarahumara, and trans-Atlantic ancestors), a nationalistic identity of Mexicanness, and being loudly queer growing up in the hood. I am La Llorona, wailing for all that’s been lost even if it’s been from my own volition. I am the devil: misunderstood, demonized, ostracized, a snake. I am a highway spirit begging someone to take me home, wherever that is. My truth is the biggest folklorist, makeshift truth for many people that may not understand how I’m “trans” if I have a full beard and my transition doesn’t look like the trans that’s traditionally accepted as demonizable. I agree with Natalie Diaz that the truest of truths are the stories, myths, left behind. I am, in that way, made of things that can fly, are magical and glow in the dark, things that can transmutate, disappear and appear, and I’ve never been more close to the truth of life. Myths are my favorite dance and where most of my ancestor-unearthing work with my family has begun.

EH: Lastly, your debut poetry collection from Sundress, Hood Criatura was recently released. Is there
anything else you are working on right now (in relation to that book or not) that you’d like to share with readers?

fh: I am currently working on a book of illustrations that will follow the chronological trajectory of Hood Criatura (Sundress Publications, 2020)! I’m really excited to bring to life my poems visually!
I am also working on a book of personal essays and my second full length poetry manuscript, but
shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone!

Natalie Diaz is a queer, Mojave poet, activist, and educator, born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). She has earned several accolades, including the 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow, a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. She is an enrolled member in the Gila River Indian Tribe and currently teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing Program.

Further reading:

Purchase When My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz, from Copper Canyon Press.
Read a recent interview with Diaz from PEN America.
Watch this reading and conversation with Diaz about “Postcolonial Love Poem” from The Greene Space.

féi hernandez (they/them) was born in Chihuahua, México and raised in Inglewood, CA. They are a trans non-binary visual artist, writer, and healer. féi is the author of Hood Criatura, published by Sundress Publications, 2020. Their writing has been featured in Poetry, Oxford Review of Books, Frontier, NPR’s Code Switch, Immigrant Report, Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (Columbia University Press, 2019), Hayden’s Ferry Review Issue 64, BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, and PANK Magazine. féi is a certified Reiki and Akashic Records practitioner who utilizes a decolonial approach to ancestral energetic healing. They collect Pokémon plushies. féi is the Board President of Gender Justice Los Angeles and is a Co-Founder of the ING Fellowship. 

Further reading:

Purchase Hood Criatura from Sundress Publications.
Read more about Hernandez in this interview with VoyageLA.
Stay updated with Hernandez and their work by following them on Twitter.

Erica Hoffmeister is originally from Southern California and earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. Currently in Denver, she teaches college writing and advocates for media literacy and digital citizenship. She is an editor for the Denver-based literary journal South Broadway Ghost Society and the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019). A cross-genre writer, she has several works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, articles and critical essays published in various outlets. Learn more about her at: http://ericahoffmeister.com/

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Summertime Fine by Jason B Crawford

sonnet for the black body turn ghost

We give black boys so much grief for their bones
Rip the teeth from the gum and let them hang
What body of melanin does not drown?
Search for a life raft to rescue the skin,
the mouth, the eyes, the hair, the culture lost
Don’t love songs still end in a funeral?
We sing the songs about our children gone
The dust in an empty room left behind
The marching on stolen soil last so long
And yet those children never return home
We chant/and chant/and cry/and chant/and chant
and chant/and chant/and chant/and chant/and chant
And still the boy stays in the ground all bone

This selection comes from Summertime Fine, available from Variant Literature. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

JASON B. CRAWFORD (He/They) is a black, nonbinary, bi-poly-queer writer born in Washington DC,
raised in Lansing, MI. In addition to being published in online literary magazines, such as High Shelf Press,
Wellington Street Review, Poached Hare, The Amistad, Royal Rose, and Kissing Dynamite, he is the Chief Editor for The Knight’s Library. Jason is a cofounder of the Poetry Collective MMPR, a group of poets who came together for laughs, bad memes, and nerd culture. He is also the recurring host of the poetry section for Ann Arbor Pride. Crawford has his Bachelors of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University.

Nilsa Rivera Castro writes about gender and diversity issues. She’s also the Managing Editor of The Wardrobe and the Non-Fiction Editor of Doubleback Review. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Huffington Post, 50 GS Magazine, Six Hens Literary Journal, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, Selkie Literary Magazine, and Writing Class Radio. She’s currently an MFA Nonfiction candidate at Vermont College of Fine Art and lives in Riverview, Florida.