When I was 15, my mother fell in love with a man who was not her husband, who was not my father. The man was in every way the opposite of her husband, my father, a Chinese immigrant with a Ph.D. in political science. The man my mother fell in love with was a white …
The Dawes Act of 1887 fragmented communal indigenous territory in Oklahoma into individual allotment plots. The water ran clay red as the crust of the earth dissolved into splintered versions of itself. The squatters who came before & after renamed land solid muscle. Big Ag lurked in the shadows, sowing genetically modified seeds of seizure. …
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Joshua Olivier on why he recommended “Beyond the Storm, the Night is Peaceful” by Daniel Mazzacane for our Fall 2022 issue. You can purchase the issue here. I loved “BEYOND THE STORM, THE NIGHT IS PEACEFUL” as soon as I read an early draft as an undergraduate, four years before …
For the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” we reached out to a range of esteemed authors to write short essays that respond to Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again I believe it was in a high school English class that I first encountered Langston Hughes, reading the …
“Of Work”: On Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” Read More »
Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Chloe Alberta on why she recommended “Founding Documents Restaged” by Craig McDaniel for our Fall 2022 issue. You can purchase the issue here. I admit, I have the attention span of a goldfish, or an excitable child—in a pile of nonfiction, “Founding Documents Restaged” caught my eye. But beyond the …
