Literature

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! It’s easy to make fun of the folkniks—those mostly college kids in the late 50s and early 60s who suddenly turned to sea shanties, work songs, and banjos for their musical

Series editor’s note: The tree in Tamara J. Madison’s poem is one that holds a blemished beauty, both life-giving and life-taking. The speaker addresses the tree right away, opening an ancient wound that perhaps all black bodies will know deep in their bones; here is a tree, a living, pulsating thing, filled with beauty, and

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! In March 2020, I turned 23. Simultaneously, the pandemic unfolded and my college closed, I flew back to my home in Southern California, I was fired on my birthday, and I

Take a break from the news We publish your favorite authors—even the ones you haven’t read yet. Get new fiction, essays, and poetry delivered to your inbox. YOUR INBOX IS LIT Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Imagine: You’re curled up in the corner of your favorite coffee shop, wearing a striking combination of knits/flannel/denim, drinking your favorite coffee and watching the leaves fall outside. You pull out

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Speculative, surreal stories can be doorways to imagine both what is possible and the effects of trauma and change on the most vulnerable people. Speculative storytelling is expansive, incorporating horror, science

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Dear Readers, In what feels like a never ending cycle of disappointing media news, last week we in the literary community were astonished to learn that after two decades The Believer

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Growing up, when asked If your last name is Juarez, where are you from, I learned that answering Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Texas only earned more questions. Even in Southern

His Best Friend is a Bottomless Void Courttia Newland Share article Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! “Dark Matters” by Courttia Newland The world beyond his room had grown mysterious, untrustworthy. He spent whole days alone, his

The outdoor Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum / Photo by Samir Meghelli, Curator The Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum exhibition Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington is an indoor-and-outdoor exhibit taking a deep dive into food-and-justice issues in the Washington,

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! Haitian-Canadian-American author Myriam J. A. Chancy’s new novel, What Storm, What Thunder is about the lives of ten people coping with trauma in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

(c) Rama, Cc-by-sa-2.0-fr NORMAN, OKLA. – World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, announced late Tuesday evening that Boubacar Boris Diop is the 27th laureate of the renowned Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Awarded in alternating years with the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature, the

Electric Lit is 12 years old! Help support the next dozen years by helping us raise $12,000 for 12 years, and get exclusive merch! This past August, two weeks before my first book came out, our childcare fell through, with immediate effect. For the first week, I cadged time off from my full-time job and

Female patient, La Castañeda, ca. 1915–20 / Fototeca Nacional, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México Men in finely cut suits and women in elegant dresses gather before a gate suspended between massive stone columns adorned by giant floral sprays. Tricolored flags fly above and alongside a sign atop the gate that reads “Manicomio

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. This spooky season, we’ve curated a reading list for every type of reader. Craving the adrenaline rush of a horror novel full

A Busted Family in a Broken Universe If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. The Big Bang In this story the details of before don’t matter—the how or why

Series editor’s note: In Ashaki Jackson’s new poem, the Black woman is at the center of the speaker’s attention, which the poet holds in her own imagining, a radical act in itself—not the act of being able to imagine blackness, but the way one upholds it in defiance of whiteness, an inexhaustible thing. Yet the

If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! We’ll send you the best of EL each week, and you’ll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. If I were to list the topics the poems in my new collection Machete dig into, that list would include colonialism, faith,