With a fellow writer, I visited Brooklyn, Illinois, the state’s oldest Black town, to interview residents and to investigate Black midwestern place-making. We found a proud, neighbors-looking-out-for-each-other vitality. But we also saw a well-balanced tension between faith and violence, loss and rigorous enduring, pride and caution. As with many Black communities, Brooklyn’s Quinn Chapel AME is one of its oldest structures, but all of Brooklyn’s many churches stand as bulwarks of faith and resilience.
Janice N. Harrington on "Through a Mobile Lens, Brooklyn, Illinois" |
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"Double Dreaming, Double Imagining: A Profile of Douglas Kearney"
"Kearney’s work is influenced by many musical genres, including hip-hop, jazz, and ragtime. As a librettist, he has garnered rave reviews for his staged operas, including Sweet Land, which was named 2021’s Best New Opera by the Music Critics Association of North America. Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022), a collection of talks he presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2020 and 2021, won the Poetry Foundation’s 2023 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and CLMP’s 2023 Firecracker Award for creative nonfiction."
viaPOETS & WRITERS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Peter Cole on Translation
"The Hebrew word tikkun means, simply, 'repair,' but it is best known beyond spoken Hebrew as a kabbalistic term that has seeped into the popular imagination. In that context it alludes to course corrections of consciousness that lead to tikkun olam—repair, mending, or even healing of a broken world. Rooted in the tradition of the biblical prophets, and critical to classic rabbinic considerations of social viability and harmony, tikkun has, arguably, become a core Jewish concept that calls for working toward a more compassionate social fabric, in part by identifying and combatting injustice." |
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