Kyla Marshell
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Articles by Kyla Marshell
Somewhere Swimming
Skip to main content Find and share the perfect poems. like everyone, I love children, their fat leg rolls, their mussed hair, their little sneakers lighting up the summer. once, I was small like that, a curious wandering eye, a bell or pinwheel turning my head, the gap between my mother’s teeth beckoning me back. somewhere swimming inside me is a question I don’t want to answer. it’s not my name I hear, but something else, drowning in its own fluid. a girl on the ferry smiles at me.
Ross Gay | Poetry Foundation
Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio. He earned a BA from Lafayette College, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in English from Temple University. He is the author of Be Holding (2020); Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award and a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award; Bringing the Shovel Down (2011); and Against Which (2006). He has also published an essay collection, The Book of Delights (2019).
Say My Name
When I was in middle school, I ran with a group of friends so tight that kids called us “the groupies.” I didn’t really understand what that meant—being an immigrant in Southern California meant I wasn’t as fast to pick up implications, snark or idioms—I just knew that it meant we belonged together. At a certain point, we were assigned S.E. Hinton’s classic novel, The Outsiders.
Lena Waithe on empowering marginalized creators and being unafraid to "ruffle feathers"
“We’ve been busy. This is what we do. We pump stuff out. We make work that we hope will cause conversations, ruffle feathers, and make people see themselves in different ways. It’s been an exciting time.” This is the greeting, and unofficial mission statement, from actor, writer, and producer Lena Waithe, who has indeed, been pumping stuff out, ruffling feathers, and causing conversations.
Dating Advice You've Never Tried: Organize Your Exes
This piece is part of How Google Drive Can Make Every Corner of Your Life Easier As a teenager, I imagined my adult dating life would go something like this: Meet man. Marry. The end. Trial and error was for losers. Dating was for doubters. By my exacting metric, any time spent with someone I knew wasn’t a match was a waste of time. Like many teenagers, I did not know what I was talking about.
Getting to the Meaning of Mariah Carey
Imagine you are Tommy Mottola. Back of a limo, 1988. Going home after a long night of what you call work—schmoozing, listening to music, keeping an ear out for the next big thing. A beautiful stranger has handed you an unlabeled cassette. The driver feeds it into the stereo, and out pours the voice of the greatest singer you’ve never heard of. You tell the driver to go back to the party, but by then, she’s gone.
The Top 100 Beyoncé Songs, Ranked
Shortly after Beyoncé's Super Bowl 50 performance in 2016, Saturday Night Live ran a short titled "The Day Beyoncé Turned Black." It was an exaggerated version of what really happened that year-when, at the halftime show, she performed "Formation," a clear departure from her previous catalog, celebrating her "baby hairs and Afros" and "Negro nose" all while dressed in full Black Panther regalia.
Practicing Non-Harm: How a Buddhist Practice Can Help Fight Injustice
JoAnna Hardy had a recurring vision: She was with a group of women, sitting around a fire. Hardy, a Buddhist teacher and the co-founder of Los Angeles’ Meditation Coalition, says that in her late 20s, she started to feel the need for “something more”— a life bigger than parties, her job, herself. Her vision manifested when, after seeing a Reiki healer, she began studying Buddhist teachings, joined a spiritual community, then studied to become a teacher herself.
What Jellyfish, Porcupines, and Other Creatures Can Teach Us About Self-Care
Fun fact: The axolotl, an amphibian native to Mexico, can regrow any body part it loses. Humans can learn from the axolotl’s regenerative powers — though we can’t regrow every part of our physical body, we can still take a cue from the Mexican amphibian by shifting our thinking from a “fixed” mindset to a “growth” mindset.
Distancing #16: Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101
It’s incredible to think of what I didn’t know then. On the first day of college, I asked a black man from Brooklyn to Harlem Shake for me. In 2005. You’re from Maine? people kept saying, underlined and italicized. I was almost afraid to speak, for fear of what new ignorance I might reveal. All through my teenage years I had been trapped in cycles of Wilco and Modest Mouse, Parliament and Oscar Peterson; I was not prepared for Atlanta at the dawn of snap music.
Emma Gannon on How to Thrive with Multiple Pursuits
British author Emma Gannon is no stranger to working from home. In 2016, after publishing her debut book Ctrl; Alt; Delete: How I Grew Up Online, based on her long-running blog on being young and “opinionated” in London, she did what so many creative types dream of: she quit her day job.
Sonia Sanchez | Poetry Foundation
Poet, playwright, professor, activist and one of the foremost leaders of the Black Studies movement, Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother died when she was very young and Sanchez was raised by her grandmother, until she too died when the author was six years old. Sanchez eventually moved to Harlem with her father, a schoolteacher, in 1943.
Amiri Baraka | Poetry Foundation
Poet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research.
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University.
The PEN Ten with Khadijah Queen
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Guest Editor Kyla Marshell interviews Khadijah Queen, author of I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On (YesYes Books). Marshell writes: Sly, sharp, witty, wry: that’s how I think of Khadijah Queen’s work. It’s not just the tongue-in-cheek (literally, the suggestion of something you can’t see) quality I love, but the unmistakable presence of side-eye, the smirking knowledge she parses out to her readers, bit by bit.
The PEN Ten with Marcus Wicker
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Guest Editor Kyla Marshell speaks with Marcus Wicker, whose latest poetry collection, Silencer, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. Marshell writes: Poems are the meeting places where Marcus Wicker’s myriad interests join together in song. There is, of course, how he marries music with politics, with life—his own young black male one, and others’, some ongoing, some snuffed.
Kaveh Akbar | Poetry Foundation
Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper, where he interviews major voices in contemporary poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, APR, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2017) and full-length collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, September 2017). Akbar has received a Pushcart and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
The PEN Ten with Natalie Graham - PEN America
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Guest Editor Kyla Marshell speaks to 2016 Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Natalie Graham, whose debut collection, Begin with a Failed Body, was published this fall. Marshell writes: “Beauty is a trap,” Natalie Graham says here, but it’s one she willingly falls into.
The PEN Ten with Laura Swearingen-Steadwell - PEN America
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, Guest Editor Kyla Marshell speaks to Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, whose new poetry collection, All Blue So Late, will be released in December from Northwestern University Press. Marshell writes: The misanthropic sea hissed.
Danez Smith
Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Don't Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award; [insert] Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), and elsewhere. They are a founding member of the multigenre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective.
Poem -- 'Is it because you don't trust anyone, or they can misconstrue your words?'
In honor of Black History Month, espnW is running essays and poems throughout February on influential black athletes.
Gene Washington's daughter Maya learns her father's legacy
In the spring of 1963, Gene Washington sat in his La Porte, Texas, living room listening to Dan Boisture, a Michigan State University football coach, make the case for why Washington should join the team. At the time, Washington wouldn't be allowed to attend any of the major universities in Texas during the era of segregation. His education would be covered with a full athletic scholarship at Michigan State.
What Happened When I Experienced A Psychotic Break
I was a senior in high school, just beginning to explore my artistic potential -- writing, composing, acting, painting -- when my brain splintered. I started to have bizarre thoughts: What word does God want me to choose? Which note is most holy? What will keep me from being punished by an all-seeing, invisible force? I sought help, and a psychiatrist explained that I'd had a psychotic break. for months I'd believed that my everyday choices could have dramatic consequences.
Mother of Black Studies
Published in 2014, SOS—Calling All Black People is a reader of the Black Arts Movement, the 1960s creative complement to the Black Power Movement. The anthology, edited by Sonia Sanchez, John H. Bracey Jr., and James Smethurst, features many recognizable names: Sanchez herself, Amiri Baraka (from whose work the book takes its title), Haki Madhubuti, Askia Touré, and Nikki Giovanni, but there are others who didn’t become go-to names for black revolutionary poetry. One is Sarah Webster Fabio.
Cave Canem Virtual Rent Party
Support Cave Canem Virtual Rent Party - donate or share on Generosity.
How Luther Vandross Turned His "A House Is Not a Home" Into the Standard
Today, July 1, marks the 1o-year anniversary of the death of Luther Vandross, who passed away in 2005 after suffering a heart attack. An unparalleled singer, songwriter, and producer, Vandross released 13 albums, recorded hundreds of songs, and won eight Grammy Awards in his lifetime. He was the rare artist who had it all: the voice, the stage presence, and countless hits.
In Search of "That Feeling": An Interview With Artist Van Hunt
In the final days of compact discs, I commandeered many a car stereo to put in Van Hunt’s self-titled debut album, breaking God’s most important commandment: Never touch a black man’s radio. “But you have to hear to the lyrics,” I would say. “He’s such a good writer.” Back in 2004, pop and R&B lyrics were endlessly frustrating to me, with their ooh-girl this and baby-please that. When I first heard Hunt’s song “Down Here in Hell (with You)” I thought, Wow, this has actual detail.
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