Summertime
Special Issue featuring Black voices
A note from issue editor Tyrese Coleman
The simple truth is that summer is just different for Black folx.
Summertime is nostalgia stirred in with your aunt’s potato salad, the only person allowed to make potato salad at the family get-together. It is the whirl of goosebumps that prickle your arms when you hear that first siren note of Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” It is our skin, brilliant against the sun, as if lit from within. The summertime feels like our time. Freedom. And yet…
Fiction
POETRY
MEMOIR
FLASH
MEMOIR
INTER/E/VIEWS
Florida sings. From Zora Neale Hurston and the Highwaymen, to Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney, to debut Black women fiction writers Dawnie Walton, Deesha Philyaw, and Dantiel W. Moniz, I continue to listen.
Libertie follows hot on the heels of Greenidge’s critically acclaimed debut We Love You, Charlie Freeman, in which the Freeman family are invited to the Toneybee Institute to participate in a research experiment involving a young chimp. Greenidge’s highly anticipated sophomore novel does not disappoint in delivering her distinctive brand of thematic intensity.