Tag: DEI

Welcome to Writers Resist the Spring 2025 Issue

March is many things. It’s officially the bloom of Spring for some, Autumn for others. It’s Women’s History Month, days of madness for college basketball fans, a time to celebrate corndogs and trees, Benito Juarez and books. Beer, pigs, and Sigrblót, peasants and heroes and transgender awareness, and countless other things living, inanimate and conceptual.

For those dwelling in the United States or connected to it, particularly those inclined toward our pages, March hosts the seventh through tenth week of the nation’s new Christian nationalist regime, a white-male-cisgender supremacist onslaught that’s devastating in as many ways as there are official celebrations in the month of March.

In response, some of us write poetry and stories, the historians of our turmoil, if not our destruction, and this Spring issue is rich with such contributions. The overwhelmed hide in mindless TV or video games, while the outraged protest with signs and letters and phone calls to legislators. Some, the hopeful, write prayers, calls to action urging a resounding response.

And when we acknowledge our power, the power of the people, we will respond as DW McKinney encourages us to in “The Sunday After.” We will unite to insist on freedom, equity, love and acceptance. We will unite to reject the cruel, the unconstitutional, the despotic. We will Lift Every Voice and Sing the revolution.

Sing with us by joining a progressive activist organization, whether your local Indivisible, NAACP, Dem Club, or any of the many groups advocating against the unfounded and brutal federal budget cuts, abductions and incarcerations, and supporting mainstream candidates in the 2026 midterm elections.

Uncertain how to get started? Read this Spring 2025 issue. Perhaps you’ll find some inspiration.

Alyssa Beatty “Enough“

Annette L. Brown “Second Flags“

Joanne Durham “Ode to America, November 6, 2024“

Kelly Fordon “The Social Contract“

Janan Golestané “Identity Theft“

DW McKinney “The Sunday After“

Caiti Quatmann “Finger Banging Slutty Young Woman“

Ellen D.B. Riggle “Assigned at Birth“

Susan Rukeyser “You Can Tell by Looking at Her“

MM Schreier “She, I, You, We: Every Woman“

Steph Sundermann-Zinger Two Poems

Ya-Ting Yu “Ya-Ting (Iris)“

Banoo Zan “The Sea Gazelle“

The Sunday After

By DW McKinney

the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States, we gather in the church sanctuary and sing the Black national anthem1. We mourn in unison. A week after the new president resumes his campaign of white (straight, male) supremacy, of “making America great,” of rolling back civil rights and liberties for marginalized people, we step backward in time with him. We borrow the strength of Buffalo Soldiers, Black infantrymen crooning the anthem as they fought on two fronts against fascists and discrimination in World War II. We borrow from our revolutionary leaders who belted the lyrics as they marched through segregated streets. We borrow from our greats and grands who sang for glory as they conducted sit-ins, and integrated schools, and lived and died and endured. Our lungs expel the words in the air around us, but we breathe them back into our souls again and again until our grief becomes a rallying cry.

DW McKinney is an award-winning writer and editor based in Las Vegas, Nevada. A 2024 TORCH Literary Arts Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships from PERIPLUS Collective, Writing By Writers, and The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her writing appears in Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, Ecotone, and TriQuarterly. She serves as nonfiction editor at Shenandoah.

Photo credit: Cover of the Hawthorn Books 1970 edition of Lift Every Voice and Sing.

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  1. James Weldon Johnson, civil rights activist and a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, originally wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” as a poem in 1900. It was later composed as a hymn, becoming a powerful refrain throughout the Civil Rights Movement. ↩︎