Xandria Phillips. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Xandria Phillips is a poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. The recipient of the Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging writers, Xandria has received fellowships from Oberlin College, Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Brown University Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, where they are researching and composing a book of poems and paintings that explore Black feeling and materiality. Their poetry has been published in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Their chapbook Reasons for Smoking won the 2016 Seattle Review Chapbook Contest judged by Claudia Rankine. Hull, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, is their first book. They are working on a nonfiction manuscript titled Presenting as Blue/Aspiring to Green, about color theory, gender, and modes of making.

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Two poems from HULL:

“Elmina Castle”

at first only the rivers and I wept
for you in your journey, like the waters’
from tropical interiors, to the estuary
slap of the ocean’s cupped hands

and then your absence became religion
as easily as creating meaning from loss of limb,
you fell into crates that rustled from within
to the tune of the wind’s phantom chorale Read More

Ladan Osman. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Ladan Osman is the author of Exiles of Eden (Coffee House Press, 2019), winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony (University of Nebraska Press, 2015), winner of the Sillerman Prize. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Cave Canem, the Michener Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Osman’s first short film (codirected), Sam Underground, profiled Sam Diaz, a teenage busker who would become the 2020 American Idol. She was the writer for Sun of the Soil, a short documentary on the complicated legacy of Malian emperor Mansa Musa. It was selected for inclusion in the Cannes International PanAfrican Film Festival and the New York African Film Festival. Osman’s directorial debut, The Ascendants, is streaming now on TOPIC. She lives in New York.

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A poem from Exiles of Eden:

“Half-Life”

Don’t turn a scientific problem into a common love story.

—Solaris (1972)

How can I fail outside and inside our home? I decay in our half-life.
How can I fail with my body? How do I stay alone in this half-life?
I started a ghazal about my hope’s stress fracture.
I require rest from your unfocused eyes, my heat,
which is becoming objective and observable.
A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?
The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”
Maybe I am the straw.
Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:
bray, flay, array.
They relate to farms, decaying things,
gray days, dismay.
I am recently reckless about making a display
of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.
Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home
by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”
You know I’m fraying.
You don’t try to braid me together.
You don’t notice a tomcat wiggling his hind legs,
ready to gather all my fabric,
his paws over my accidental tassels.
I’ve learned how to be appropriate sitting on my hands
on the couch, not allowed to touch you.
“Sex?” you say, like I asked you to make a carcass our shelter. Read More

Sylvia Khoury. Photo: Yael Nov.

Sylvia Khoury is a New York–born writer of French and Lebanese descent. Her plays include Selling Kabul (Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival), Power Strip (LCT3), Against the Hillside (Ensemble Studio Theater), and The Place Women Go. She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center, Williamstown Theater Festival, and Seattle Repertory Theater. Awards include the L. Arnold Weissberger Award and Jay Harris Commission and a Citation of Excellence from the Laurents/Hatcher Awards. She is a member of EST/Youngblood and a previous member of the 2018–19 Rita Goldberg Playwrights’ Workshop at the Lark and the 2016–18 WP Lab. Her plays have been developed at Playwrights Horizons, Williamstown Theater Festival, Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Roundabout Theater Underground, Lark Playwrights’ Week, EST/Youngblood, and WP Theater. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.F.A. from the New School for Drama. She will obtain her M.D. from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in May 2021.

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An excerpt from Selling Kabul:

TAROON
You don’t want me to go, is that it?
You want me to stay?

AFIYA
Of course I want you to go.
Don’t be stupid.
You think I want you here?

TAROON
I can handle whatever they send, Afiya.
Good, or bad, or nothing.

AFIYA
Nothing!
Exactly.
I hate it, seeing your hope when you check for messages.
Watching it crack when there’s nothing.
There’s always nothing. Read More

Sarah Stewart Johnson. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Sarah Stewart Johnson grew up in Kentucky before becoming a planetary scientist. She now runs a research lab as a professor at Georgetown and works on NASA missions. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Harvard Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her book, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2020.

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An excerpt from The Sirens of Mars:

Mars, after all, is only our first step into the vast, dark night. New technologies are paving the way for life-detection missions to the far reaches of our solar system, to the moons of the outer planets, far from what we once considered the “habitable zone.” To worlds that hold stacks of oceans amidst shells of ice, floating like a layer cake. That spew out jets of briny water through cryovolcanoes. That have pale hills and dark rivers and hydrocarbon rain. And then there are also the planets around other stars. There could be as many as forty billion planets that could support life in the Milky Way alone, belted with moons and moonlets—potentially an entire solar system for every person on Earth. The idea of knowing these places intimately, of one day touching their surfaces, may seem ludicrous. The universe has a speed limit—it’s slow, and these worlds are very far away. What could we ever know about them, besides a few details about their orbits, perhaps some spectrographic measurements of their atmospheres? They are points of light and shadow at the very edge of our sight, far beyond our grasp. Then again, that is exactly how Mars seemed only a century ago. Read More

Marwa Helal. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Marwa Helal is the author of Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), Ante body (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2022), and winner of BOMB Magazine’s Biennial 2016 Poetry Contest. She is also the author of the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press, 2017) and has been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, NYFA/NYSCA, Poets House, and Cave Canem, among others. Born in Al Mansurah, Egypt, she currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Two poems from Invasive species:

“poem to be read from right to left”

language first my learned i
second
see see
for mistaken am i native
go i everywhere
*moon and sun to
ل letter the like
lamb like sound
fox like think but Read More

Donnetta Lavinia Grays. Photo: Beowulf Sheehan.

Donnetta Lavinia Grays is a Brooklyn-based playwright who proudly hails from Columbia, SC. Her plays include Where We Stand, Warriors Don’t Cry, Last Night and the Night Before, Laid to Rest, The Review or How to Eat Your Opposition, The New Normal, and The Cowboy is Dying. Donnetta is a Lucille Lortel, Drama League, and AUDELCO Award Nominee. She is the recipient of the Helen Merrill Playwright Award, National Theater Conference Barrie and Bernice Stavis Playwright Award, the Lilly Award, Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award, and is the inaugural recipient of the Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award. She is currently under commission from Steppenwolf, The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, WP Theater, and True Love Productions.

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An excerpt from Where We Stand:

Eyes widen as we walk the streets of this shiny unfamiliar. And Ohhs and so many Ahhs.

What’s that moment when your spirit finally sees what your children see in you? Hero. Protector. Smartest person in the room. And that wealth of responsibility and expectation washes over you … in fear. I never knew I could be as big as y’all imagined me to be. We walked the length of this town like to have all y’alls hope pressed into my chest. A hope we didn’t think possible.

A still could be?
A better than?

WE DIDN’T KNOW Read More