The album that emerged is a series of vignettes about the men in Breedlove's life, living and dead, beloved and infuriating. It spans the AIDS crisis, chosen family, knife collections, and a complicated inheritance of grief that Breedlove transforms, as he always has, into something that makes people laugh and cry at the same time.
I see myself first and foremost as a weaver working at the intersection of craft and technology. As an Angeleno, I grew up learning how to weave in the Wixárika tradition of my matriarchal bloodline by watching my mother and my grandmother.
I want to grow brands that I'm passionate about, and dirty soda has always been a part of my life. It wasn't just this viral moment that people who watch Secret Lives saw. It was something that's more sustainable.
Playwright Mikki Gillette—described once as 'the Joan of Arc of the trans community in Portland theatre' by actor and critic Bobby Burmea—sets the work in the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot. We're dropped into the lives of four trans people practically begging the world to care about their pain, but with very different ways of approaching a brighter future.
Marsha eventually brought her salon to campus and founded the Comparative Literature Women's Caucus, an activist collective that established the first women's literature classes in Comparative Literature, conceived and taught by graduate student women. Caucus members helped produce the first major translation anthologies of women's world-wide poetry, encouraged women to write feminist dissertations on women authors, and researched discrimination against women in the department.
Valentino, you were the person I spoke to, not the person I spoke about. You were beside me when words were not needed. Life was not always perfect, but it was real. One day at a time, for more than 40 years, all strung together, became extraordinary because we were living them together. This is what I'll miss about you most.
Louise Pearl's one-woman show Pass the Nails and Shame The Devil recounts the experience of her family's ordeal building their own house amid Oakland's 1980s crack epidemic as her strong-willed, Louisiana-born mother and gather a motley crew of men to make this dream home into a reality.
There's love, all the time beside me, its rolling tides polishing jagged moments with surprise apologies silly jokes extra snacks and the great luck of seeing a heart switch on the light that opens a locked-down face. There are landmarks: each person I've loved each one who loved me-quirky waves we've ridden together.
You've seen it: state laws against transgender girls in sports, bans on minors taking hormones and puberty blockers, bathroom bills, and the like. Used as a political cudgel and broadcast in campaign ads, this vilification of transgender people has resulted in a shift of public opinion. Hostility has penetrated the middle of the road, where most people could once be characterized as neutral or indifferent, but where they now put themselves in the majority that opposes specific transgender rights.
I had a close male friend who is openly gay (I am non-binary, assigned female at birth). We had a lot in common, became close really quickly, and started spending a lot of time together. Slowly, I realized I was falling for him, and one evening after a party, I confessed. On the spot, he took it really well. He said his feelings are entirely platonic and that he likes me as a person.
Karen Russell has built her literary reputation on stories that bend reality without losing emotional grounding. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Swamplandia!, Russell often blends the strange and the intimate, pairing mythic elements with sharp psychological detail.
A little rice? A little soup? I'd rather die reading the early texts you sent about my breasts. I wouldn't take a picture- infidelity!- and so instead had conjured them with words, for which, with words, you gave me back a tongue we dragged across the skin of common thought. Such is our lot, our shared disease or gift. Like Bernini's angels propped somewhere in Rome
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. For more than 50 years, the French artist Sophie Calle has worked in the space between facts and their retelling, demonstrating how the narratives we share about ourselves are always partial, constructed. Working across photography, text, film and installation, she reveals how fantasy and projection intervene in our best attempts to see and be seen.
On January 22, artist Gabrielle Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo filed a founding affidavit in the High Court of South Africa in Pretoria, stating their intention to challenge South African Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie's unilateral decision to terminate the video and performance series, Elegy, at its national pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. McKenzie had attempted to characterize Goliath's piece, which would have centered Palestinians enduring genocide in Gaza, as "highly divisive" and not aligned with South Africa's interests - even though the country famously brought a legal case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague over allegations of genocide in Gaza.
The Center for Literary Arts presents acclaimed author Venita Blackburn, Compton-born creative writing professor and founder of Live, Write, an organization offering free creative writing workshops.
I've been writing both poetry and short stories since I was a child, but I first began to think of myself as a writer when my 11th-grade English teacher encouraged me to lean in. I started to take my craft seriously in college, majoring in English with a focus on creative writing. By the time I graduated in the mid-1990s, I considered myself a poet.