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Arts in Society brings our previously siloed poetry and fiction—along with cultural criticism and belles lettres—into a common project. It focuses on how the arts—including the visual arts, theater, dance, and film—can speak directly to the most pressing political and civic concerns, including racism, inequality, poverty, demagoguery, sex- and gender-based violence, a disempowered electorate, and a collapsing natural world.
Poetry
Remembering poets Lynda Hull and Michael S. Harper, with original portraits
Poetry
As my relatives melted, I stood
on one leg, raised my arms, eyes shut, & thought:
tree tree tree as death passed me—untouched.
Critics tend to discount Rich’s later poems, fundamentally misunderstanding how they engage her radical vision of community.
A series of creative reflections on why Yusef Komunyakaa remains one of our greatest living writers and what it means to be a Black Jazz Poet.
Poetry
An Abortion Ban
is a body snatcher,
is an ethnic cleansing.
The uterus is a cave,
is an incubator, is a vault,
is a self-destructing bomb,
is a thoroughfare.
Poetry
. . . I am
nott afrayde of swells
that lift mee
off my feet,
or of a strong
undertow
Poetry
Every city I’ve lived in has been filled with racism, whether out in the open or hidden in an invisible dialogue of economics and housing. Birmingham taught me to never question what it meant to be a Black American.
Leo Bersani was a groundbreaking queer studies scholar who rejected the word “queer.” We can still learn from his contrarian sense of what made homosexuals unique.
Kemi Alabi’s Academy of American Poets First Book Award–winning Against Heaven answers generations of spiritual violence and threatened damnation with reclamation, repopulation, and a redefinition of heaven.
Poetry
our bloom game too strong / altar stays red candle cinnamon-lit
sweet flicker cracking into prance
Boston Review hosted a virtual reading to celebrate the release of our annual arts anthology.
Poetry
“Just let me just lay here and do nothing
cause boss bitches get lonely too”
Her critical writings explore the interrelations of philosophy and poetry, politics and prose—all against the backdrop of a society remaking itself in the shadow of fascism.
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Chair of African American and African Diaspora Studies; Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, and the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University.
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A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
