In his lifetime, writer and activist Charles Shively filled his Boston rowhouse with the printed residue of 20th-century queer liberation. His friend Michael Bronski recalls what he found when packing it up for the Beinecke Library archive—poetry at the heart of politics.
Reading between the lines of history, the author finds queer kinship in the literature left behind by his gay ancestors.
The editor of ArtsEverywhere, Shawn Van Sluys, looks at the special features that the comics form brings to politics, and the uses various North American countercultures have made of them.
This podcast features elements of improvisation in daily life for a first-generation immigrant to Canada. Featuring TV producer, Amit Tandon.
Readers who love what they read sometimes become writers of the same stories. They call it “fan fiction,” even if copyright lawyers call the police. Juli Parrish asks what happens collectively when the line between reading and writing dissolves.
A Rotterdam activist tells the story of his neighbourhood’s recent effort to make its own reading room after the local library branch closed.
In the space of her writing the legendary Kathy Acker found an arsenal of voices that gave her agency and opened readers and writer to a volatile politics. Her biographer, Jason McBride, recalls Acker’s boldest, early efforts.
A polity of literature can assemble in myriad ways and places. American artist and writer, Anne Focke, considers two examples: the “parallel polis” of 20th-century Czech resistance to Soviet domination; and a practice called “the dynamics of difference,” rooted in the work of Native American tribes in the Humboldt Bay area of California.
In Berlin, writer and philosopher Fred Dewey created a functioning polity of literature by inviting small groups of strangers to meet, discuss, and read out loud from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.
Creative translations of the multi-dimensional ways that we can be and are together, even while faced with great pain, tension, and uncertainty.
Six encounters at six social distances, told incrementally through prose and needle painting.
A journalist offers insight on the COVID-19 response in Africa, while struggling to explain social distancing to her young daughter.