MQR is pleased to announce that it has awarded this year’s trio of literary prizes to the authors of an amusing—and poignant—story about strangers in the strange land of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an elegant poem on perspectives during a balloon flight, and a gritty poem listing the detritus of life at a Detroit high school.
MQR Announces 2011 Literary Prizes Read More »
by A.L. Major
“The crazy thing is I’ve never been called a nigger to my face” begins Issa Rae’s blogpost. Issa Rae, for all those who do not know, is the creator, writer and star of the hit web series, “The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl.” In her recent article,“People on The Internet Can Be Hella Racist” Rae describes how after winning the 2012 Shorty Awards, her twitter and Facebook pages were inundated with racist comments, that ranged from horrific to downright deplorable: “I nominate @awkwardblackgirl for @shortyawards in #cottonpicking.” And then “#ThingsBetterThanAwkwardBlackGirl The smell coming from Trayvon Martin.” Most times, I’m not even sure these people are fully aware of what those words truly evoke in a historical context. These are people, who I imagine, outside of the internet are perfectly respectful to people of color, might even have friends of a darker complexion, might even have voted for Obama (Yes We CAN!), but somehow they traded in their civil decorum and decency for the internet’s anonymity.
What People Are Willing To Say On The Internet Read More »
The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronounceable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again.
“You Owe Me” Selected for 2012 Best American Essays Read More »
by Nicholas Johnson
Things are merging. New ideas and new art forms are arising out of the combination of elements. Video, sound, the past the present, documentary, biography, history, truth, opinion … In a time when so much more happens than one can possibly keep up with, an increasing number of artists are obsessed with looking back for something that we missed, records and documents of formative events that we missed out on.
History as Art: Luke Fowler’s All Divided Selves Read More »
by Gina Balibrera
Christy Turlington, 1990s supermodel and Salvadoran-American, may or may not be my prima. The connection has never been confirmed, and I’m not trying to say I’m as fly as Christy, but her mother’s maiden name, “Parker,” is an apellido shared by some of the members of my family in El Salvador, and she grew up near San Francisco, where I grew up, so it’s not inconceivable to imagine that some of her family came over to the US around the same time mine did, maybe even on the same boat. El Salvador is a small enough place that finding unknown relatives can be as easy as flipping through the phone book.
Of Necessary Mangoes: Color Me Weird Read More »
by Virginia Konchan
Emily Dickinson, autodidact par excellence, wrote a whopping 360 poems in 1862, in a small bedroom in Amherst, MA, in a home owned and inhabited by her father: it’s good to remember, in other words, that both organisms and people can thrive under inhospitable conditions.
by Nicholas Johnson
Can you remember a time before the internet? bubblebyte.org is a London “based” online only gallery for a generation of artists who probably cannot. The work on display ranges from animated gifs and flash animations to creative use of html coding and embedded video. These artworks engage with the digital space and explore the possibilities of the internet as an artistic medium.
by A.L. Major
Though I’m a perfectly socially-adequate human being, who has little issue speaking to other people, the AWP conference still seemed to me the worst possible idea: thousands of otherwise isolated, oftentimes socially inept, or rather “quirky,” writers annually come together in a confined space to talk about the very thing that drives us into insanity. It’s an event that prompts in my mind, first and foremost, “Who came up with that idea?” and, more specifically, “Why?” I might have a very romantic idea of myself as a writer, but I see myself holed up in a tiny room, frustratingly pounding away at my keyboard, not procrastinating on Facebook and certainly not schmoozing and networking with other writers, professors, agents, editors. That’s the way it should be shouldn’t it?
Seeing Writers at AWP Read More »
And … we’re off. To Chicago. Along with at least 9,300 of our dearest friends aka readers and writers.
fiction by Chidelia Edochie
I spent that Christmas Eve with my schoolmate Bibi and her parents at the National Palace, comparing the sizes of presents and our thirteen-year-old breasts with the other daughters of cabinet members and businessmen. All over Port-au-Prince younger children were taking off their shoes and filling them with hay so that Papa Noël could lade them with gifts as they slept. In the palace chandeliers gleamed down on us, everyone so drunk off of anisette punch that the whole place smelled of sugar and rum and salt from their sweat.
Bibi’s father, Mr. Mesadieu, kept an arm around President Duvalier as if they were brothers. The whole country called him Baby Doc—not fondly—and I’d heard Mr. Mesadieu refer to him as le bébé idiot. Our textbooks said that the Duvalier family had been the savior of Haiti, though our teacher often let it slip that he found the extravagance of their lifestyle distasteful. But I knew that Bibi liked him.
“The King of Hispaniola,” by Chidelia Edochie Read More »
