Kassy Lee

After three years of living in New York, I went back to Mexico during the summer of 2023 to visit family. Guanajuato, a small town in Mexico, is the place where my mother grew up, the place that her side of the family still calls home. In between family gatherings and exploring the town, my aunt pointed something out to me that she knew I would enjoy. In one of the corners of her house laid a dusty old suitcase. When I opened this suitcase, stories came flowing out.

Debra Priestly’s recent solo exhibition “black” at Jane St. Art Center demonstrates the enduring sense of openness and renewal which has vitalized Priestly’s decade-spanning career in the visual arts. I met Priestly last summer when she was a Visiting Artist during a dreamy early summer residency at the Vermont Studio Center.

Reginald Dwayne Betts’ newest poetry collection Felon (W.W. Norton, 2019) details a lyric account of the butterfly effects of incarceration, specifically the mass incarceration of black men in the United States of America. In Felon, Betts builds on his two previous collections Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James, 2010) and Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), and draws on Betts’ own trek from incarceration as a teenager in maximum security prison to Yale Law School.