Category: featured

Black, I: Them Things

Growing up black, you learn real quick the things you just don’t speak about. My auntie and them voices was one of them things…

You Can Bring Your Sheet Cake, But Do Show Up/ Erin Langley

Standing up for people so they won’t be murdered is not a radical agenda. We are not showing up to pay for the crimes of our ancestors. That would imply that the instinct to protect life arises from debt. We do owe a debt, but protecting human life is common decency. We need to show up because it is the right thing to do.

Interview: Icess Fernandez Rojas

“My friends say I’m an activist but I don’t think I do enough things to be considered an activist. My storytelling is my resistance, it’s my defiance, it’s my self-care…”

The Bastard Need/ Icess Fernandez Rojas

I know that today was payday because your wallet bulges from the back pocket of your dusty Wal-Mart jeans. I know that your truck smells like sweat, like taco meat, like recently sprayed $5.99 musk for men because it was on sale. It’ll mask the smell of honest work, the smell of hunger, the smell of indiscretion.

Black Mourning: Let Our Grief Be Our Own

We must let our grief and our celebration, our individual experience, be our own. Because given the voice to speak our own way, we all have something distinct to say about our collective history and future…

Appalachian Pride: B is for Bisexual/ Frankie Wolf

This piece was part of the show “Queerology 101,” performed in April 2017 for Rowan County Pride. In the show, a misguided professor attempts to define each letter of LGBTQ, getting it wrong every time. For the B, he said that, like the Sasquatch, Appalachian Black Panther, and other “mythical” creatures, there simply was no proof that bisexuals are real.

Queer Appalachia: Not-So-Mythical Critters

The Appalachian LGBTQ+ community doesn’t need me to say a damn thing for them. Their voices are ringing down the gravel roads and bouncing off twenty story buildings. If you listen you might learn something…