Crate Digging in the Freelance Files: An Interview with Sheila Maldonado

“This is, quite simply, material: someone was smart enough to keep it, so it could be sampled.”

Inside the Loop: On Chanting, Houston, & Solange as Producer 

“When I Get Home on repeat, I leave & come back to it. I come back to myself. I come back to get myself. To pick myself up.”

A Literary History of My Romance

It is time to elegize a living man who died in my arms on the…

Grief is a Many-Headed Monster: A Mixtape

Living in New Orleans, oftentimes reality feels like fantasy. Not a cookie- cutter kind of…

Girlhood, Or, So What If Diamond Is A Stripper Name

after Céline Sciamma’s film Girlhood (2014) Don’t act like you never met them—withering bright acrossthe…

Performance Studies

She must be having a seizure,La Lupe’s beau-to-be thinks as he sees her first sing…

Self Portrait As Aretha’s Gold Purse

My reputation walk in the room 
before I do.

Showtime’s Here: Litefeet’s Lady Legends

In Islam, Mecca is a fixed place you travel to—a physical pilgrimage to the house…

If Your Girl Only Knew: Missy Elliott’s Offstage Sonic World

When Missy Elliott’s debut album, Supa Dupa Fly, dropped in 1997, it was the summer…

Debut Fiction | The Spring 2025 Issue

“There is no way I could have known that my own journey to debuting as…