Author: Scott LaClaire
on Peach State by Adrienne Su

If the apple is that most iconic of American fruits, what is its counterpart among diasporic cultures from Asia? When I was growing up in Baguio City in the Philippines, one could buy tissue-wrapped “Red Delicious” apples and “Sunkist” oranges …
on Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, edited by Anjanette Delgado

Every piece included in Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness, a new anthology edited by Anjanette Delgado, grapples with the concept of “uprootedness,” a term used by Reinaldo Arenas, an influential Cuban novelist and gay …
on Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

God tastes like a walnut. Jesus tastes like fried chicken. Dolly Parton tastes like Sweet’N Low, and matricide—for any correlation or the lack thereof—tastes like peach cobbler. Monique Truong’s second novel, Bitter in the Mouth (2011), is a coming-of-age story …
Mississippi Masala Revisited

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on Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Like Yaa Gyasi’s previous novel, Homegoing (2016), and in the spirit of many other works by West African writers, her latest book, Transcendent Kingdom, straddles two worlds. This story about how a young woman resolves the tension between her …
Enveloped by Memory

INTRODUCTION
Though he is only twenty-five years old, Miami-based artist Mark Fleuridor’s textile and multimedia portraits show assuredness and maturity far beyond his years. Since graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2019, Fleuridor has exhibited work …
Gardens at the Margins

INTRODUCTION
For many people, the concept of documentary work conjures images of a filmmaker shouldering a large camera or an archivist poring over transcripts and records, but North Carolina–based artist Saba Taj shows that documentary principles can underpin work in …
Monumental Achievements

INTRODUCTION
In May 2020, Yehimi Cambrón had an unusually good view of Atlanta, from a hundred feet in the air, where she stood in the bucket of a boom lift surrounded by paint cans and brushes in the sweltering heat, …