April Yee
As seen in:
The National,
The Harvard Crimson,
Shondaland,
The Rumpus,
Electric Literature,
Ploughshares,
The Offing,
I CARE IF YOU LISTEN
Covers:
literature, colonialism, energy, climate change
Writer and critic of fiction, essays, and poetry; trustee @STWevents; mentor @refugeejourno (cover art: James Hopkins)
Articles by April Yee
Like Yin and Yang, Poetry Holds Tension Between Polarities
Li-Young Lee’s first collection in a decade, The Invention of the Darling, remixes many themes from his five previous poetry books: family, exile, intimacy, and the divine. Yet somehow these plain verses feel fresh. In “Counting the Ten Thousand Things,” Lee writes, “Start over in secret, at night with my mother and father and the escape to… Canaan? Bethlehem? America?
When I Close My Eyes
When I close my eyes, Gaza is covered in a radiant white light. But it’s not white phosphorus—it’s warm, it’s soulful, it’s good. When I close my eyes, there are no lines of people desperately waiting for their ration of food, water, or fuel. There are no children carrying the lifeless bodies of other, smaller children. There are no ice cream trucks used as morgues for bodies whose lives were cut short by precision bombs.
My Year of Light
Autumn When I worked on Governors Island, I would wake early to commute from Queens to the ferry in lower Manhattan. At 7:05 the light was still misty, forming a veil over my eyes. But by 7:10 this light accelerated into a sharp glow, and by 7:20 this glow was full-bodied, no longer a suggestion. The transformation always made my body feel like it was experiencing time physically, like I was a leaf in a time-lapse video, transforming from lush green into a nutty brown.
Zebrafish - The Offing
In a windowless lab somewhere, a scientist feeds hydrocodone to fish. He begins with food—giving the fish the tools to feed themselves: a motion-sensor platform, a thin metal tube leading down into the water. When a fish swims over the platform, a green light flashes and a little snack travels down through the tube.
Q&A with Yanyi, author of Dreams of the Divided Field
Yanyi is the author of Dreams of the Divided Field (One World, 2022). His poem “Inheritance” from The Year of Blue Water was previously published in The Offing. Q&A conducted by Crisosto Apache, Associate Poetry Editor. Donate to The Offing! Our Patreon supporters received exclusive early access to the full video interview with The Offing contributor Karen Cheung and receive other perks as well.
Ashes Above Us - The Offing
Someone found the jar in the basement of my aunts’ Zagreb apartment building and immediately alerted the police. The fetus was floating inside and I imagine it sitting on a metal shelf, towards the back, the dust on the glass so thick that the person making the discovery – the building’s custodian, perhaps – could not at first identify the contents. Perhaps he shook it, or took a handkerchief from his back pocket in order to study its depths.
On Playing Risk and Studying the Maps of Colonialism | April Yee
There are two types of people: those who play board games, and those who cringe at the suggestion. For most of my life, I believed myself to be among the latter, baffled when visitors to my apartment asked if I owned any, as if dinner were insufficient. That changed when companions found one in a hotel.
My Blues - The Offing
Soon after I moved to the UK, a woman sprinted through my village’s main crosswalk, where traffic from two hills streams into a dip in the road. I had rushed to make the light many times myself, running to the beat of the flashing green man. New to my adopted country, I did not know that the flash meant cars could go after idling red. The woman sped across just as a tractor-trailer released its brake, rolling through the crosswalk in time to catch her leg in its massive wheel.
Review – Brilliant Corners by Nuzhat Bukhari, A Blood Condition by Kayo Chingonyi • Poetry School
Posted in Blog 3 days ago by April Yee How do we reconcile conflicting inheritances? Many poets of colour find themselves caught between two roads: the English lyric, whose focus on internal feeling can imply a disavowal of history, and the real histories from which today’s poets arise; histories bent by the home of the English lyric.
You Have Certain Rights
Image courtesy of bbbrch k Abram is a poet and collage artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work has been supported by the Blue Mountain Center and recognized as a finalist for the Wabash Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate and creative writing instructor at NYU. You can follow her work on Instagram @ok.abram and on Twitter @ok_abram.
Courtroom Sonnets
Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash Opening Statement I only ate steaks. It was Nelly Furtado and Timbaland, wind flipped through sunroof and washed hair, Jaeger dropped in soda pop. It was iced Dunkin’ and Red Stripe, single bed, educational strip club trips. It was nail artists and hair stylists opining on Red Lobster. It was toll roads and asphalt overpasses flung over churches of Scientology, steering in time to stay on sky bridge and not sing inevitability. It was newspapers piled on a porch.
The Agency of Men in The Atmospherians and How to Kidnap the Rich
Some traditions don’t need translation—they are ever-present and transcend boundaries. Take misogyny, and what happens when men notice that they are no longer powerful. The actions they take––catcalls, rape, murder––are consistent, and described through passive language that erases male agency. In India, for example, “Eve teasing” references a religion in which women exist to serve men, and dangerous consequences for women are a side effect of male play.
Creating Inclusive Spaces for Neurodivergent Artists (Casting Light #1)
“Casting Light” is a 10-part series that explores the often invisible inequities in contemporary arts spaces. Commissioned by ACF and I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, the goal of the series is to highlight the conversations that we need to be having more openly and transparently in order to build diverse, inclusive, and equitable artistic communities. Building on our commitment to anti-racism, a culminating collection of these articles and other resources will be shared for continued learning and dialogue.
In the latest wave of science fiction, authors of color take space to imagine multiple new societies
The year 1968 was one of racial progress and retreat: the year athletes raised their fists in a Black power salute at the Olympics, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was slain. In the world of science fiction – far ahead in an invented future – the period brought more progress. "Star Trek" aired the first kiss between two characters of different races on television.
7 Books to Commemorate the Fall of Saigon
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. April 30, 1975—the day Americans helicoptered out of Saigon and Communist forces rolled in their tanks—goes by many names: the Liberation, the Reunification, the Fall.
"The Committed" skewers colonial fetishization, inspired by controversial coffee table book
A closer look at the audacious orgy scene in Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel set in 1980s Paris The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images/Grove Press) Near the figurative and literal climax of "The Committed," Viet Thanh Nguyen's sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Sympathizer," a motley elite –– politicians, businessmen, a priest, and other white men privileged in the novel's 1980s Paris –– meet at a luxurious building. With the...
The Labor of Being Black
Among the indelible moments at the trial of Derek Chauvin, the ex-police officer who lynched George Floyd, was the testimony of witness Donald Williams II, one of the people called to describe the trauma of watching someone be hurt without being able to help them.
The Colonial History That Contributed to the Atlanta Spa Shootings
In 1937, Nguyễn Thị Hải was 17 years old when the message arrived that changed her and her family’s fortunes. It summoned her to a military base occupied by the French, who at that time ruled Vietnam. To protect her chastity, a cousin accompanied her to the meeting. At the base, Nguyễn was separated from her cousin and informed she would be examined for sexually transmitted diseases. She insisted she was unmarried, a quaint way of saying she was a virgin.
“I absolutely wanted to present an upturned tale of exploration and resource gathering and success”: An Interview with Chang-rae Lee
In one of the most uncomfortable scenes in Chang-rae Lee’s sixth and newest book—and there are many uncomfortable scenes—women line up in heels and bikinis on the stage of a Macau brothel euphemistically named “Evergreen Shores.” As other men fight over a white sex worker, the American twenty-something narrator, Tiller, is urged to select one of the remaining Asians.
Process over Product: Midst and Craft in the Real World
Process over Product: Midst and Craft in the Real World Writers are obsessed with seeing other writers at work: the interviews of the Paris Review; the canonization of daily routines (Ursula K. Le Guin: “5:30 a.m.—wake up and lie there and think”); that black-and-white photo of Stephen King, feet on desk, his corgi perky-eared below his legs as if to spill his secrets. By replicating their routines, we believe we can drag our pens in their grooves.
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Committed” Is a Spy Thriller Where the Real Enemy Is Colonialism
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 promise and problems of the protagonist of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s two novels—2015’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer and 2021’s sequel, The Committed—spring from his two faces.
The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Committed Viet Thanh Nguyen Grove Atlantic | March 2, 2021 One man’s murder is another’s revolution. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel The Committed, his sequel to 2015’s The Sympathizer, explores the moral duality of leftist violence in a book that marries thriller and theory, racing the reader through the criminal underworld of Paris before stopping to unpack Frantz Fanon.
The Repetition and Accretion of Violence
Violence seldom comes in a single dose. A flurry of punches; a rain of gunshots; the irradiated dust that kicks up decades after nuclear disaster. Any schoolyard bully can affirm that violence is most effective when performed repeatedly over time. Three recent books examine state violence by using violence’s signatures—repetition and accretion—as tools within the text.
How to Convey the Refugee Experience Without Resorting to Refugee Tourism
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 project of American Dirt was noble: make the migrant experience compelling and relatable for those who might otherwise turn away. The prose is slick, the story structured.
Luster, A Lover’s Discourse, and the Portrayal of Whiteness
Whiteness cannot bear to be looked at. See the elaborate costumes of rioters who stormed the Capitol, or the hoods their predecessors wore. This unwillingness to be scrutinized makes it difficult to portray whiteness, a phenomenon often only seen in its contrast to color.
A Cultural History of Racial Fraud
essays From my great-grandfather to "Black Like Me" to Jessica Krug, what it means to perform race for a white audience Before the crisis, I dined at a bistro on England’s coast with a septuagenarian white man and woman with whom I am close. As is inevitable when dining out, we eddied into the topic of favorite restaurants. I mentioned a Chinese place where Peking duck pancakes are made by hand and long noodles served free of charge on birthdays, like cake.
Seeking a shepherd outside the city
Seeking a shepherd outside the city By April Yee These days, I feel unground- ed, wanting a long road to distance me from air that some might say Allah exhaled for me to breathe and suffocate from dust. The yellow sheets of dust hang heavy, brush the ground. Some mornings I can’t breathe. I pack up for the road: a tent, a torch, all of survival’s plan. Somewhere I’ll find a place with air.
Middle East oil and gas firms urged to be vigilant on cyberattacks
Oil and gas companies need to defend against cybersecurity breaches arising from their reliance on vendors and contractors, says a new report. As the firms modernise their computer systems and open their networks to outsiders, they can inadvertently expose themselves, according to the American technology consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton’s report. It said industry leaders must assess the security of external vendors in protecting their business assets from disruptions.
UAE's first nuclear power plant gets green light
The nuclear regulator has given the green light for the construction of the UAE’s first nuclear plant. Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (Enec) is set to pour the first concrete tomorrow at the coastal site of Baraka, where four nuclear reactors supplied by a South Korean consortium are scheduled to come online between 2017 and 2020.
UAE nuclear power decision imminent
The nuclear regulator is expected to make a decision within days on whether to grant a licence to build the country's first reactors.If the Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation (FANR) gives the green light, the UAE will become the first nation to embark on a new civilian nuclear programme in nearly three decades.The last nuclear newcomer nation to begin construction on an atomic plant was China in 1985, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a United Nations...
Bingham, 72, Heir to Media Empire, Dies
On Jan. 27, at a Boston Ritz-Carlton dinner table with his friends of 50 years, George B. “Barry” Bingham Jr. ’56 proposed the impossible: a Charles River row in a lightweight eight-oar shell to take place this week. Two years earlier he had suffered a heart attack and received a pacemaker, and in the seventies he had battled Hodgkin’s Disease. At the January dinner, friends were “relieved” at the state of his health.
What Her Skin Doesn’t Show
She has other things on her mind. She’s thinking of volunteering at a suicide clinic, and after she earns her Bachelor’s at the end of this summer, she wants to join the Peace Corps in some place far away, like Bulgaria or Brazil. Far, far in the future, she wants a husband and kids. And now, she’s got to get to work. A student at Salem State during the week, come Friday night Bambi drives to an office in Lynn, Mass.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with April
Contact April, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack