Winter 2020

The essays in our Winter issue showcase writers displaying a fundamental talent—that of deep, lucid inquiry into widely shared experiences. Julia Cooke offers a kind of close reading of the birth narrative—its power and its politics; Pamela Erens mines fresh critical insight from the novels of literary phenomenon Elena Ferrante; Simon Han, meanwhile, tests a new metaphor—that of sleepwalking—for the experience of living through 2020; and in the final installment of his borderlands trilogy, Francisco Cantú explores the origins and cultural power of Tejano-music titan Selena. Other features include a story, reported in collaboration with the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN), on the growing popularity of homesteading in the age of the pandemic; photographer Brian Palmer’s sublimely rendered visual documentary of forgotten African American burial grounds; and fiction and poetry that forgo convention for more adventurous constructions of interior life. (Cover Art: Hudson Christie)