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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.
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.
Fiction
“The Earth’s skin had become a million toads.” After a town undergoes a disturbing transformation, a boy finds a solitary companion.
No other artist more perfectly anticipated the banal strangeness of life in the twenty-first century.
A “woke” remake that peddles in symbolic representation is not the film Puerto Ricans deserve.
Known mainly as a realist, the writer used the gothic form to explore the horror of being confined by gender.
Two recent essay collections explore the interplay between literary genre and a rapidly changing planet.
Marlon James discusses writing realistic Black characters, being inspired by African folktales, and why we don’t have to let go of the world of make-believe to tell serious stories.
In this new anthology of poetry, fiction, memoir, comics, and essays from renowned writers and newcomers, contributors explore whether and how we can repair from terrible ruptures.
Narrative medicine claims to champion the experience of patients—but it does so by requiring that the sick “earn” their care by telling a redemptive tale about what is wrong with them.
Amazon’s Tales from the Loop has introduced a new audience to the speculative worlds of the Swedish artist, whose books depict worlds in which humanity has, in one way or another, run afoul of technology.
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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
