Black Estrangement

“Black Estrangement: An Introduction” by Elinam Agbo

Dear Reader,

“How are you?” feels like an insensitive question in 2023. More so if you don’t sit down with someone and give them space to think aloud and find their footing. Over the past three years, most of our conversations have just been checking in. What has happened in your life since I last saw your face? Are you alive? Are you sure? We exchange self-care routines and fail to follow them. We remember each other’s birthdays. We send long voice notes and Instagram reels. A friend cancels our check-in; their brother passed suddenly. Another friend goes offline; they had to fly home, thousands of miles, for another funeral. In another country, my grandmother dies, and I don’t find out for months. What would you have done, my mother says, if you knew? I have no answer. I can only stare at the bones on my plate.

Read the rest of “Black Estrangement: An Introduction” here.

In This Issue

Cover Image & Art

Jamiyla Lowe
Shared Accommodation (2020)
Digital drawing
9 x 12 in.

Contributors’ Notes

Melissa Beneche holds an MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. Her work has been shortlisted for the 2022 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and she is a runner-up for the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. She has received residencies from the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and Tin House. She lives in South Florida, where she is working on a short story collection and a novel.

Ariana Benson was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Their debut poetry collection, Black Pastoral (UGA Press, 2023), was selected by Willie Perdomo as winner of the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She was a 2022 recipient of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and runner-up for the 2023 92NY Discovery Prize Contest. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, the Yale Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness. She is currently completing her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis.

Allison Noelle Conner’s writing has appeared in Rockhaven: A History of Interiors, Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, The Music Center’s For the Love of L.A., and elsewhere. Born in Ft. Lauderdale, she lives in Los Angeles.

Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from Tennessee. His first novel, All God’s Children, is forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company in 2025.

b is a queer Bahamian poet, essayist, educator, and dreamer currently living on the ancestral homeland of the Lenape people. By the way of friends, collaborators, institutions, and luck, their poems and essays have been published and featured in places like the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They’re currently working on a nonfiction book, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2025), about Hurricane Dorian, the effects of climate change on Small Island Developing States, and how centuries of far-flung injustices—like colonization, slavery, and numerous inequalities at local and global scales—have come to precipitate the climate crisis.

Edil Hassan is the author of Dugsi Girl (Akashic Press, 2021), the winner of the Cave Canem 2023 Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and a finalist for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Poem-a-Day series by the Academy of American Poets, Guernica, and elsewhere. Hassan is currently working on a debut poetry collection about film, Black diasporic performance, and the limits of romance.

N.K. Iguh (they/she) is a fiction writer and educator whose work centers immigrant identities and experiences. They have received grants and fellowships from the Center for Fiction, Vermont Studio Center, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Kimbilio, and the DISQUIET International Literary Program. Their writing has appeared in Guernica, the Los Angeles Review of Books, This Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration, and elsewhere.

Jamiyla Lowe (she/her) is a black illustrative artist with a concentration on drawing, self-published books, screen printing, and sculpture. She has exhibited her work in galleries and at small press fairs in Canada and the US. She currently lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Jenise Miller is a poet, writer, and urban planner from Compton, California. Her work explores art, archives, place, and intersectional history. She is a recent California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow and PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, as well as a Tin House and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) workshop alumna. She created the KCET Artbound series “Compton: Arts and Archives” and coordinates the Compton Arts Interview Project. She is a Pushcart-nominated poet, and her writing is featured in her poetry chapbook, The Blvd (Blurb, 2019), as well as the Acentos Review, Boom California, the Los Angeles Review of Books, High Country News, and the forthcoming anthology Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California. Find her work at www.jenisemiller.com | Tw/IG: @jenisepalante

Mathapelo Mofokeng is a screenwriter and author from Johannesburg, South Africa. Her writing has appeared in Gagosian Quarterly, adda magazine, and Popshot, and has been anthologized in the PEN America Dau Prize’s Best Short Stories 2021 and The Future of Media. She is a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Wrtiers, as well as fellowships from MacDowell, the Miles Morland Foundation, the Camargo Foundation, and Chevening. In addition to writing, Mofokeng works as an end-of-life companion, grief counsellor, and abortion doula.

Leila Renee has fiction in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Prairie Schooner, Columbia Journal, Transition Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, and other places. She received the 2021 Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and was selected for the Best Microfiction 2023 anthology. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University.

Jeneé Skinner’s work has appeared in Catapult, Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You can find her on Twitter @SkinnerJenee or Instagram @jskin94.

alex terrell (she/her) is a Black Southern writer and maker of worlds. She is a recipient of the 2018 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Puerto del Sol, BAX 2020: Best American Experimental Writing, and elsewhere. For more info on terrell and her writing, visit her website at alexterrell.com.

Masthead

Elinam Agbo
Guest Editor

Nicole Terez Dutton
Editor

Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky
Associate Editor

Jackson Saul
Managing Editor & Design Editor

Misha Rai
Consulting Editor

Sara Carminati
Copy Editor

Special Thanks

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Edwidge Danticat, Danielle Evans, Karen Lord, Chinelo Okparanta, Deesha Philyaw, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan