Winter 2022

The Winter issue brings together a range of provocative work distinguished by risk-taking and uncommon perspectives on familiar themes. Scholar Ed Pavlić reflects on the meaning of his insistence to live a racially nonbinary life, a nuanced self-definition that defies the polarized racial categories of contemporary American culture. Elsa Julien Lora addresses an all-too-common but woefully under-discussed health-care issue among Black women—uterine fibroids—as a vehicle for an intricate meditation on Black maternal health care and female legacy. Photographer Kris Graves approaches the catastrophe of California’s wildfires almost counterintuitively, long after the blazes are out, to build a visual narrative of the landscape’s uneasy new normal. Fiction by Farah Ali, Kalani Pickhart, and Jenzo DuQue takes us from student protests in Karachi to Ukraine in the Second World War to tense US–Colombia relations around the turn of the twenty-first century in Cartagena. Meghan Flaherty dives into the strange trend of ecosexual marketing online, while Kate Zambreno finds symmetry in—of all places—the monkey house of a Paris zoo. Megan Buskey and Dionne Ford contribute to the #VQRTrueStory project; columnists Jim Coan (Drawing It Out), Raj Telhan (Human Practice), Laura Kolbe (Art & the Archive), and Anuj Shrestha (Open Letter) return; and poetry by Diedrick Brackens, Martín Espada, Dave Lucas, and Lisa Russ Spaar.