The Girl in the Mall
Growing up in my rural Ohio town, the mall was our refuge. It could also be dangerous.
Growing up in my rural Ohio town, the mall was our refuge. It could also be dangerous.
Portraits and reflections on the legacy of Black women artists and arts workers in Chicago.
Before my junior year of college, in 1972, I worked at the manufacturing plant where my father was a foreman. It was an education.
On the eroding shores of Lakes Michigan and Huron, a buried eighteenth-century lumber port, and the stakes of inaction.
"Each time I come back home / something else has burned."
Notes on living and moving as an out queer person in the Rust Belt.
Sixty years ago, my parents took us on a driving tour of Lake Michigan, the quintessential Midwest road trip.
"The jukebox at Pizza King didn’t bump any songs past / 1978 but we fed it quarters anyway"
Olcott, New York—"The French Riviera of Lake Ontario"—has sunk and rebounded in a way so minor, yet major enough to feel like a triumph.
"When my son rides the Switch Back Gravity Rail over coal lines in Jim Thorpe, I hope to God the mountains are His and my boy might believe in his ancestor clans."
"The landscape of Fairfield County, Ohio sprouted the seeds of my imagination, helped them take root." [Excerpt]
"this is how i ground myself. / i follow the writing on the wall."