Langston Hughes’ Radical Ohio Youth
To Hughes, America has never achieved its potential. Never reached the supposed promises enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
To Hughes, America has never achieved its potential. Never reached the supposed promises enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
"I do appreciate titles that use the terrain instead of making their characters sit inside. I also enjoy titles that reveal the parts of our region that outsiders are unlikely to see, like Homewood, Butler, or old school, residential Oakland. Yinzers don't gaze down from Grandview Avenue all day like the movies would have you believe."
Reimagining the Rust Belt in Megan Giddings' "The Woman Could Fly."
Purdy’s harshest words were consistently aimed at the literary apparatus that he felt was inherently unable to appreciate his formally deliberate but thematically audacious fiction.
As much as Ohioans like me and others want to claim Morrison, her words belong to the world.
Literature isn’t just under attack in Iran, China, or El Salvador, however.
"I didn’t know it then, but I needed those windows...that wall of blue between my heart and the world."
"The snow f e l l like a miffed god took bites of cumulus clouds—spat them down / from heaven, o n t o my Midwest."
Kelsey Ronan’s 'Chevy in the Hole' reimagines the city some of us never knew.
Strip-mining destroyed the landscape of central Ohio--and the lungs of many workers. What will it take to build a healthier future?
A poem of erasure.
Andy Warhol, the Rust Belt, and me.