An excerpt from the article, “Poetry as a Mirror,” by Glenis Redmond (poetry, ’11) in Teachers and Writers Magazine:

Poetry as a Mirror

Poetry has given me a mirror in which to reflect upon myself as a Black girl turning into a Black woman. The first poem in which I saw my reflection happened when I was eleven years old. I was a fifth-grade student at Aviano Elementary in Ms. Vann’s class in Aviano, Italy–we were an Air Force family stationed overseas. On one uneventful day in February, the teachers rounded up all of us elementary students and walked us over to the high school gymnasium for a Black history program. Assemblies in my eleven-year-old mind were cool because we missed class, but assembly in lieu of recess was not so cool. However, little did I know that I would not miss my favorite playground game that day, Prison Ball–little did I know that my small world was about to be magnified.

I am sure that I was well mannered and respectful during the program, because that was how I was raised. Yet it was not until Yolanda Walker, a tenth-grade girl, took the stage that I became fully engaged. I became rapt before a word ever fell from her mouth. I noted how cool Yolanda was–dressed in all black and sporting an Angela Davis afro. Her clothes, her swagger, and her sense of agency took me in. Then she recited a poem, “1,968 Winters” by Jackie Earley. Her performance blew my fifth-grade mind. It was not just the poem, but how she conveyed the poem with a full-bodied delivery. The essence of the poem came alive with Yolanda’s gestures, stance, and attitude.

The poem she read evoked laughter with its colloquial speech and repetition of black black black, then white. On the surface it could have been mistaken for just a funny poem. I laughed along with everyone else, but the turn in the poem got me. When the speaker walks out into the white snow after arming herself with black feelings, black music, and black thoughts, I wasn’t laughing anymore. I saw myself in a piece of literature for the first time. This poem instructed: If you live in a world that does not embrace or accept you, you will feel emotionally cold. I got it. The poem demonstrated how I felt in my young life to date. Up to then, I had never seen myself reflected accurately in a textbook or any other literature. I liked my teachers, but they were not culturally competent.  […continue reading here]

An excerpt from “Skating Through An Uncertain World” by Emily Shoff (fiction, ’16) from The New York Times:

Skating Through An Uncertain World

Telluride, Colo. — The snow came late to Telluride this year.

Until a week ago, our normal 70-inch base stood at a paltry 30 inches and amber waves of grass rippled on south-facing slopes, already ready for the summer elk.

Usually, there are a dozen ski runs curving into town; at the beginning of February, there was only one, an icy chute coated with a thin veneer of fabricated snow. Our mountain hamlet was quiet, too quiet, everyone panting for tourists and the crisp green bills they set down upon our quaint streets, paved off the backs of gold miners.

The average annual snowfall is 300 inches. This season we’ve had 99 inches so far, with more than two feet of that falling in just a week. We welcomed it with the joy of parched desert-dwellers greeting the rain. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the short story, “A Girl Goes into a Forest,” by Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96), one of four published by Waxwing:

A Girl Goes Into the Forest

Tentative, curious, uncertain, alive, she followed him into the woods, moving in the direction where perhaps she imagined the rest of her life waited for her. So ready for something to happen. The old secret cottage had fallen to the ground. He acted as if that surprise of the disintegrated shelter were inconsequential, and spread a thin jacket over the dark forest floor for her. To lie down was harder than it looked to be; wasn’t everything? A thick scent of pine needles. Sour smell of mildewed ash. The moon rose. White and tiny, smeared into the fork of a naked branch overhead. Wind chattered like teeth through the trees, their trunks containing hundreds of years of memory. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the sonnet “Sonnet with Swan and Long Tall Sally,” by Robert Thomas (poetry, ’02), one of three sonnets published in The Yale Review:

Sonnet with Swan and Long Tall Sally

What if we’re the crux, the diamond lynchpin?
What if creatures in other galaxies
have a vague sense that something is missing,
but don’t know it’s Little Richard, Shakespeare,
and cornbread with plum jam? They have their songs,
but like the Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge, not
Exile on Main Street, or as if Monet
stopped painting before the water lilies; […continue reading here]