Local
New Skool Slam
In a shift from the past series of neighborhood-based reportage, students from the spring session of The Brooklyn Rail/Urban Word NYC New Skool Journalism Workshop covered the city’s annual Teen Poetry Slam championships. Over several months the teens explored their own subject matter and their voices as reporters without limiting themselves to what might be considered the parameters of traditional journalism. Special thanks to Poets & Writers—for without its support, this ongoing collaboration between Urban Word and The Brooklyn Rail would not be possible.
—Knox Robinson and Meghan McDermott, editors
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
My Beautiful City
By Thomas HeiseMARCH 2021 | Field Notes
In the spring of 2020, as the plague was sweeping the city, I found myself several times a day staring at an Instagram page dedicated to the furniture and household goods New Yorkers were tossing to the curb. Amongst the flotsam and jetsam were steamer trunks, benches of reclaimed lumber, numerous upright pianos, boxes upon boxes of books, a fainting couch with flower upholstery, glass vanities, bar stools, two Noguchi coffee tables, stand-up globes (I counted at least three) that hatched open at the meridian so you could store liquor inside, seemingly every fiddle leaf fig tree in the five boroughs, and other bric-a-brac and impedimenta and whatever else could be quickly discarded in a desperate effort to get out of New York as fast as possible.
Chitra Ganesh: A City Will Share Her Secrets If You Know How to Ask
By Amber Jamilla MusserAPRIL 2021 | ArtSeen
As this year’s QUEERPOWER commission, Chitra Ganesh has filled 10 panels of Leslie Lohman’s façade with images of queer activism, joy, and meditations on history, possibility, and gentrification.
Joe Andoe: Jubilee City
By Eleanor HeartneyAPR 2019 | ArtSeen
Painter and writer Joe Andoe offers another glimpse into this alternate reality. In his 2007 memoir Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed, Andoe draws on memories of an unsupervised childhood and drug-fueled adolescence in Tulsa, Oklahoma filled with car wrecks, petty crimes, and maniacal substance abuse.
from City Dwellers/After Brecht
By Owen HillFEB 2021 | Poetry
Owen Hill’s last book of poetry was A Walk Among the Bogus (Lavender Ink/Dialogos, 2014). He also writes, edits and annotates crime fiction.
