Of Note Magazine offers an intersectional approach to art and activism, covering issues such as race, class, education, the prison industrial complex and sexism. Their focus—through mediums such as photographs, sculpture, video, and prose—is on using art as a template for both expression and change. From its “Impact” section on their website, Of Note says:

Through its curated issues, OF NOTE has featured over 70 Artists from 40 countries who use the arts to address social justice/human rights issues. OF NOTE’s long-form journalism authored by its roster of over 30 emerging and established internationally-based Writers has focused on how artists are:

1. addressing mass incarceration in the United States
2. responding to current immigration debates and challenging preconceived notions about immigrants
3. championing the education of girls in developing nations
4. raising awareness about indigenous communities around the world
5. bringing attention to the plight of girls caught in Colombia’s drug and gang wars and illuminating the heroic stories ofEthiopian girls who fight back against child marriage
6. documenting the plight of abandoned children with albinism in Zimbabwe
7. shedding light on the dangerous journey of migrants between the Guatemalan/Mexican border
8. combatting the culture of silence surrounding domestic violence in Indian communities
9. fighting illiteracy among the ‘Born Frees” in South Africa
10. confronting sexism in the portrayals of women and girls in the media

Of Note‘s current issue, “The Burqa“, tackles a subject most timely: the systematic oppression of minority groups in the United States and elsewhere based on religious belief, appearance, and cultural signifiers. Islamophobia runs rampant, showing itself in ways new and old, from electoral politics to the No-Fly List to targeted hate crimes. In a powerful editor’s note by Of Note founder Grace Aneiza Ali, the burqa is explored as a means of denoting identity for both wearer and oppressor.

While many employ the burqa as fodder for debate, the Artists Of Note we’ve selected for The Burqa Issue use their creative voice and art practice to examine the complicated experiences of the women who actually wear the burqa—by choice or by force. These multi-disciplinary global artists employ the burqa, actual and symbolic, in their photography, documentary film, poetry, graffiti, street art, murals, sculpture and painting, to trouble our perceptions.

While their art questions, provokes, defends, indicts, or unapologetically takes a stance for or against the burqa, it is art that is first and foremost deeply personal, before it is political. Each of these women know intimately, and at times painfully, how the world encounters women donned in burqas because they have worn them or borne witness to stories of the women they love—their mothers, sisters, aunts, matriarchs and friends—who have.

Last spring, in their “Imprisoned” issue, Of Note featured artists whose work focuses on mass incarceration and the racist and classist tendencies of the United States that set people of color up for the “school-to-prison pipeline.” It is unsurprising, then, that Randall Horton found himself the topic of discussion once again, as he has broken that mold of his own accord. A piece by Sally Ann Hard titled “Randall Horton: From Prison, to Poet, to Professor” is one of the highlights of this issue. Horton’s poem “A Reoccurring Nightmare In Maximum Security” opens the essay, in which Sally Ann Hard shares her own experiences loving a man behind bars. Hard’s subsequent activism focuses on ensuring that, after release, prisoners can transition back into society with the least possible stigma.

Previous issues of Of Note can be found online.

On Saturday, December 12th, from 7:00-8:00 pm, Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop in DUMBO will host a night of “literary hip-jazz-blues.” The event will feature a performance by the experimental jazz band Heroes Are Gang Leaders, whose members include poets Thomas Sayers Ellis, Ailish Hopper, James Brandon Lewis, Luke Stewart, Margaret Morris, and Randall Horton, whose Hook: A Memoir we published last month. It will surely be a night that celebrates lyricism in a myriad of forms.

More Heroes Are Gang Leaders:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/heroes-are-gang-leaders/

More of Randall Horton:

Hook: A Memoir is available for purchase from Small Press Distribution online.

Following Randall Horton’s last segment on Fox on November 30th, he appeared again on The Stan Simpson show this week.

The interview with Simpson touches on many themes throughout his new memoir, Hook: poverty, drugs, class, growing up black in America. “What happens is that you become sucked in—but then you become addicted,” Horton says. But Horton has always dealt in the seemingly insurmountable and so too has come out on the other side. Watch the interview to learn more about Horton’s journey.

Hook is currently available for purchase through CreateSpace online.

Mad Magi

On the evening before the early morning fire, Maximo looked up at the black Florida sky littered with diamonds and shivered in the January cold. The wind hurtled off the churning waves in Miami’s Biscayne Bay and ripped through his corduroy coat.  The links of his 18-carat gold chain felt icy against the coarse black hair on his chest. He remembered the winters back home on the island; they were never quite as cold as this one in exile.  Not so cold that he had to turn on the electric blanket and plug in the floor heater before diving into the sleep that left him feeling more dead than alive.          

He reached inside his shirt and touched the carved gold medallion of San Lazaro, patron saint of the sick, the lost, the woebegone, and offered a quick prayer. Standing in the evening wind,he wrestled with the details of a plan growing like a reckless monster in his head. Each time he thought about it, he felt more certain he would go through with it: call Ana from a phone booth, tell her he was ready to leave his family, pick her up at her apartment and begin the drive north to a new life. There had to be something beyond what he wasdoing: selling toys seven days a week. He needed lightness of being,and he had to take the first step to find out where it was.

Cecilia M. Fernandez is the author of Leaving Little Havana: A Memoir of Miami’s Cuban Ghetto, selected as a finalist in three categories at the 2015 International Latino Book Awards, one of the top ten nonfiction books by a Latino author (2015) and a finalist in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Book Contest (2011). She is an independent journalist and college instructor with a passion for literature. Her work has appeared in Latina Magazine, Accent Miami, Upstairs at the Duroc: the Paris Workshop Journal, Vista Magazine, and Le Siecle de George Sand. A former reporter for The Stockton Record, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the Miami television stations WPBT, WSVN, WSCV, and WLTV, Cecilia is an Emmy nominee from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; she received Dartmouth University’s Champion Tuck Award (Honorable Mention for Television), the Scripps-Howard Award: News Writer of the Month and a Fellowship for Independent Summer Study from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Cecilia earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida International University and an MA in English Literature from the University of Miami. Her undergraduate degree in journalism is from the University of California-Berkeley.

On Monday, Fox News shared an interview with Randall Horton about his new memoir, Hook.  The interview details Horton’s downward spiral towards drugs and to prison, both of which ultimately led him to pen Hook and become a professor at the University of New Haven, among many achievements since.

Randall Horton’s Author Page.

Her, Bodily

Montgomery Wards. The name on our lawn mower connected by a thread to the nametag shining on her breast. Glass sheen walkway and a country of beds, shoe on shoe on shoe, and the box full of gold. Mom stands behind it. I see her skirt through the glass she tells me not to touch. Lets me hold the red ruby ring.

I wanted the Hush Puppies. Tassels. Little moustaches shimmying over the puckered toes.

Homeward, we slide over the truck bench, DadMeMom. The scent of sunrust, the sweat and perfume soaking through blouse tied at the throat. How she would pull the sash loose, exposing her moles—constellation over the rise of breast flesh.

There was the moment of crossing the green bridge before the rise of land and road. The truck spasmed—halted—at the base of the ascent. What did I know about distance until we opened the doors into darkness, held hand into hand and began stepping?

I was too big, but she held me. Held my body in long stretches. Arrived to the pay phone fused like an animal with two heads, a bouquet of sweating limbs. Where did Dad go? He came for us, I know. He went the other way in the dark.

Bessy, he named her. The truck that never carried us again.

Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the Managing Editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. Her poetry and prose has recently been published in: Passages North, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, The Pinch, Smartish Pace, The Collapsar, Pilgrimage, The Squaw Valley Review, The Superstition Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She curates community literary programming and is a member of the Quoin Collective, a local letterpress group. Check out her website for more: www.sarahpape.com.

Poets House, known for its extensive (60,000-volume) poetry library, events, and workshops in and around New York City, has announced a deadline of December 11th for their annual Emerging Poets Fellowship.

Through the 12-week fellowship, lead by Adam Fitzgerald, selected poets will have the opportunity to engage in discourse, guidance, and workshops with both peers and distinguished faculty and guests. Events and conversations with poets and scholars will also take place during the fellowship period. Tuition is free and a stipend will be provided to cover travel expenses. At the end of the fellowship, a group reading will be held, showcasing the prose completed over the three months.

Interested applicants are highly encouraged to submit work before Friday, December 11th.

To learn more about Poets House and the application process, visit their website.

Help

Sometimes, I sat at my small table by the window and imagined a man older than me, but still young, sitting with me, his long fingers holding my best teacup. The alley below empty, the windows in the building across the alley empty, the plant on the table blooming its purple flowers in the morning light and then the afternoon light and then the evening light. He steadily returned my gaze. I had not felt that kind of love since childhood, certainly not since I lived in that apartment, but during that time, the man really did help me. I told him about the sounds of grief in the alley, the malleability of time, shifting shadows and light, isolation, dreams, the sewage system, broken things, colors, closets, phone calls, stains making shapes on carpet, my red pants, ants and squirrels, the materialization of cornbread, the gaps between people, the company of furniture. I would say, the lover becomes memory and memory becomes an artifact, a sacred tomb.

I offered him more tea.

It’s nice to have someone to listen to, he said, gazing steadily back at me, something in his expression more ample than realism. He told me the good news, our hearts cradled in sacrificial light, shepherds braying with sheep, bread and fish, buoyancy of water, two palms open to us, vast skies, pearly gates, corpses rising, birds in flight, the feeling of acceptance for all beings, this feeling sometimes so insistent he felt he would explode. The lover lives in us, he said.  In the seas, in the fur of horses and dogs and bears, in the fins of fish, in grass and seeds,lamp light and sunlight and lungs and sidewalks. 

Sometimes we didn’t even talk. Sometimes I think those times were the best.

And now, so many years later, as I sit at my computer in my office, I think how soothing that would be, to have Jesus in my imagination again. What is the harm, really? To be accompanied by his enormous good will and kindness, even for a little while. And even if it isn’t real.

Nona Caspers is the author of Heavier Than Air, which received the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has received a NEA Fellowship and an Iowa ReviewFiction Award, among others.  Stories from Alley Stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, Cimarron Review, Epoch, and other literary reviews.  She is also the author of cross genre Little Book of Days and recently co-edited with Joell Hallowell a nonfiction book Lawfully Wedded Wives:  Rethinking Marriage in the 21^st Century.  She teaches Creative Writing at San Francisco State University.  www.nonacaspers.com

This week, Literary Hub posted an excerpt from Randall Horton’s Hook on their website. The selection, a prime example of Horton’s dynamic voice, is titled “1990: theater of the absurd.”

Horton writes,

One guy stayed by the van and held his elbow chest-high to me as if to prevent the contemplation of retaliation. Drake did not move. Not a breathing human in sight. Odds dictated I freeze and watch those chasing arms grab Stump about the waist, stopping and then twirling his torso. He could’ve been in a modern ballet, ripped shirt and all. But more importantly, the package tore, and white powder trailed Stump everywhere he was flung. Call it Theatre of the Absurd. Call it early American vaudeville. To call it a rag doll disintegrating into yarn does not do the metaphor justice. It took one minute for the five men to take the package off Stump’s body, leaving him swinging, clutching, and grabbing at the wind. Stump resurrected himself from the ground, dazed and breathless. No police. We hopped back in the van, negotiating the curve at almost fifty, not in pursuit, but in gettin ghost. We were victim and perpetrator at the same time.

To read more of the excerpt, visit Lit Hub.

As always, you may purchase Hook and other Augury titles through Small Press Distribution.

More of Randall Horton:

Randall Horton’s author page.