| | | Janet Mock sits down with the Congressional heroine, Anna Quindlen writes, and more in this week's Lenny. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | June 13, 2017 | Letter No. 90 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
Back in January, I was having a lot of feelings about the fundamentals that make up who I am. I'm a woman. I'm first-generation Ecuadorian on one side. I'm Jewish. People have always asked me questions or made assumptions about my ethnic background, but feeling these three parts of myself under attack by our new administration and its supporters, it's been more difficult to reconcile all the probing.
I feel confused when some white guy at my friend's birthday says buenas noches to me, then addresses the rest of my friends in English. I feel even more irritated when people ask what my nationality is. It's not like I have an accent or some other major giveaway that I'm not a U.S. citizen. When I answer that I'm American, they always look at me like I'm fucking with them. "Oh, but where are your parents from?" is usually their next question.
There is something utterly graceless about their analysis that there's something exotic about me. I used to find it entertaining to have people guess — especially when a few different guys in Paris thought I was Algerian — but recently I'm realizing how easy it is to lose sight of myself in the way that others perceive me. I become evasive, and maybe I do fuck with them a little. That's why I find this week's interview with California representative Maxine Waters (an outtake from our new podcast with the brilliant Janet Mock, Never Before) so refreshing. I could take a note from the way she shrugs off others' appraisals of her. She can put Bill O'Reilly in his idiot place with a single, well-placed glare.
I'm also loving the latest iteration of the Lesbian Cattle Dogs comic. In this installment, the dogs have a nighttime chat, which so charmingly reminds me of when my sister and I shared a room as kids; we would end every night with pillow talk after our mom had turned out the light. Another fun one is from Lenny's own Laia Garcia, who breaks down why you're seeing pineapples everywhere in the fashion world these days, and why the spiky fruit is the feminist emblem we've been waiting for (truly). Also in this issue, we have an essay by Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Anna Quindlen, who is confronting and anticipating cultural differences of her own in the upbringing of her first grandchild.
In our interview with Kim Coleman, Spike Lee's casting director, she talks about how "we're all a small piece of the puzzle." While she's referencing moviemaking, the sentiment reminded me that we can't always shut out the people around us, however politically different or culturally ignorant they may seem to us. Sometimes it's useful to get out of my own bubble if only to realize my frustration is larger than just myself. This week, I'm going to try remembering that.
xx Molly Elizalde, Lenny assistant editor | | | | | | | | | | | | Auntie Maxine Waters Is Reading All Your Tweets | | | | By Janet Mock | | |
My black-girl soul soared high above my pajama-clad body in March when Representative Maxine Waters said on national television, "I am a strong black woman, and I cannot be intimidated." She became an instant heroine, and I watched her clip nearly 100 times. It became my new bop, the song I listened to when I needed to be reminded of my own particular greatness in a world where women and girls like myself are told to be grateful to be let in.
Like millions of millennials and movement-makers who follow the 78-year-old congresswoman, I have clung to her every side-eye, her every call for impeachment, her every grandstanding attempt to speak truth to power. She feels close to home for me. She sounds like the women in my family: powerful, melodic, and straight to the damn point. It's the reason why the Internet dubbed her Auntie Maxine, claiming her as their own, striking an adoring familial connection. My admiration for Representative Waters followed me as I entered her office at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, to interview her for the latest episode of my Lenny Letter podcast, Never Before (click here to subscribe).
Representative Waters has been in Congress for nearly three decades, representing California's 43rd congressional district, which is centered in South Central Los Angeles. Though she's in her fourteenth term, Auntie Maxine became a political "It" girl, errr, woman, of sorts in the wake of Donald Trump's election as the 45th president. Representative Waters has called for Trump's impeachment on the record more than any other person in Congress. This has made her a life-giving political leader of the resistance and an easy target on the right, particularly with Fox News hosts. One went so far as to compare her to Whitney Houston and advised the congresswoman to "step away from the crack pipe," while Bill O'Reilly insulted Waters's appearance on air by calling her hair "a James Brown wig."
But Auntie Maxine is clear that there is nothing wrong with her appearance, her words, and her work, and in our hour-long conversation, some of which is excerpted below, she addresses the criticism, but, more important, she discusses how her roots in segregated Missouri shaped her as a young black woman, how her mother taught young Maxine to raise her voice, and how the burgeoning feminist movement helped her win her first election.
Janet Mock: I want to go back to the beginning. I feel like so many who know you as Auntie Maxine may not know your roots in Kinloch, Missouri, the first African American town to be incorporated in Missouri. How did that vibrant black community shape you?
Maxine Waters: Well, I was very young when I was there, but it was a very warm community where everybody knew everybody. Of course we were accustomed to black entrepreneurs where we shopped at our grocery store and at our bakery. Our schoolteachers were black. We had a very positive image of black leadership throughout our community. Churches were very supportive. It was a very warm and supportive community.
JM: Do you remember the first time you used your voice and got a reaction as a young woman?
MW: Oh, no. My mother was like this, she was very outspoken. She had no filters, really, so I think that most of her children grew up that way. We didn't know that we were speaking out, we didn't know that that was different from the way that other people are taught to react to other people, and to voice their opinion. It was quite natural for us, and I think most of us have done that all of our lives.
JM: What did your mom do for a living?
MW: She didn't. She raised kids. My mother had thirteen children.
JM: That's quite a living. I don't think you have time to do anything else.
MW: She was married twice. She never really had a job. She may have had some odd jobs in between, but for the most part she never really had a job. We were in and out of welfare between the two husbands, etcetera, so she never really worked.
JM: Social safety nets helped out a little bit there, which is great. I'm sure you also helped out a little bit. As a young person, you worked in a segregated, whites-only restaurant in St. Louis. How did that experience shape your political consciousness?
MW: We were all eager to work when we were young. All of the kids in my neighborhood worked during the summer in various jobs. We had some of the young people in my neighborhood who actually went to work in strawberry fields and picked strawberries during the summer in the outlying county areas. I worked at Thompson's restaurant, where I cleaned tables. It was segregated; we had to eat in the basement.
We felt responsible for ourselves, and we weren't looking to our parents to go out and buy our clothes, or to buy a new bicycle for us, or new skates. We did it for ourselves. You know what I'm saying? We took a lot of responsibility at an early age for ourselves and our well-being.
JM: How did you get from a small town to being politically active in your community?
MW: My family moved from Kinloch to St. Louis, where I attended most of grade school and high school. Then I married young. My first husband was in the service, and we went to California, where I worked all kinds of jobs. I worked in factories, and then I was an operator for Pacific Telephone. Then I became a service representative, and then when the War on Poverty came into being and it talked about Head Start, a program where working families would have an opportunity to provide early-childhood education for their children in the way more wealthy families could. That excited me and some of my friends.
I ended up in Head Start as an assistant teacher and became supervisor of parent involvement and volunteer services, where I organized parents to help fight for the funding for Head Start to keep it growing. It brought me in touch with the politicians, and I learned about which politicians were great and were supportive, and which ones were not. That took me into volunteering in campaigns for those politicians that I thought were supportive. The women's movement was coming into being, and I got involved with NOW and NWPC, and these women's organizations.
My predecessor before I ran for the California State Assembly had gotten in some kind of trouble, and he was going to leave. He tried to close down any opportunities for anybody other than his assistant to run for the seat. He didn't tell anybody he was going to leave office, so at five minutes to five, he and his assistant went into the secretary of State's office. He filed, and of course it closed everybody else's opportunity, because filing was over on that day. There was a woman who was the secretary of State, March Fong Eu, and I had some friends who were a judge and [with the] ACLU. I went to them, I said, "Something's wrong with this picture."
We went to her and she opened up the filing for another five days, and I filed. The women got behind me, and we campaigned in some new and different ways. We didn't have as much money as the opposition, but at that time, gardens were becoming very popular. So we packaged garden seeds. At that time, the community was basically a still-growing Latino population, more black population, and a dying-out white population. We sent carrot seeds to the whites, we sent cilantro to the Mexicans, and collard greens to the blacks. We would go knocking on doors: "Ms. Waters, I got my seeds." Years later, because collard-green stalks grow real tall with big leaves, and they stay for years, people would tell me, "Come see my stalk," or "I'm gonna fix you some collard greens," and on and on.
Anyway, we campaigned in new and different ways. I'll never forget this story where my friends were over campaigning in Southgate, this was a white part of the district, and they were asking them to vote for Maxine Waters. They didn't have any pictures of me or anything. They said, "Maxine Waters, is she an N-word?" She said, "No, she's a woman." They said, "OK." That's a funny story that became a real laugh in our campaign. We had our whites in the white community, they were significant voters, but the black women in the district, I listened very carefully to them, and I started to put their wording back into campaign literature. They would see me, I would talk to them, and they would say, "Why not a woman?" I'd do my literature: Why not? Why not a woman? Connecting back with them.
We created some new ways of doing things, but that's why it's so important for young people. I was talking to the college Democrats and millennials, saying, "If we don't have that kind of new thought interjected into the way we do things, we'll become stagnant." What we're seeing now with tweeting and Facebook and all that, that's a new way of organizing. I tell you, sometimes I just go through the tweets and laugh all night long.
JM: Memes can mobilize.
MW: That's right, memes can mobilize.
JM: One of your most viral moments was in reaction to Bill O'Reilly, after he compared your hairstyle to that of James Brown, who has great hair. You were asked to respond and you gave the greatest sound bite. Of course, I got my entire life from that, because as a young black woman navigating white spaces, it was nice to be reminded that we can speak back. What would your advice be to young black women, specifically at work, who are constantly being told that they should be contained, that they should be quiet, that they should sit in the back and just be grateful to be let in?
MW: I have a theory that I've developed about many of the millennials. They have gone to school, they've gotten educated, they had their sights on a career, their parents were supportive and pushed them on. Told them, "You're going into the corporate world," or what have you. "Dress right, do this," and all of that. They did all those things, and then they got to the water fountain and they discovered that they were seen and perceived quite differently, and that there were comments that were made and actions that were taken that were disrespectful, not appreciative for someone who had invested their time and their energy just like some of the other people in the workplace who may not have been African American, etcetera.
I think this thing about Auntie Maxine and loving the way that I speak out has to do with "I kept quiet, I did everything they told me to do, and look what they did to me. That's right, Auntie Maxine, tell them."
This interview has been condensed and edited.
To hear the entire interview, click here to subscribe to Never Before With Janet Mock.
Janet Mock is the author of Redefining Realness and the new memoir Surpassing Certainty, out today. | | | | | | | | | | | | Pineapple Explosion | | | | By Laia Garcia | | |
Without realizing it, you are surrounded. Everywhere you look, there they are. Look down, there's probably one on your body right now.
I am talking about pineapples, of course, which in the past couple of years have become the de facto decoration. Embroidered into jeans, woven into silk blouses, turned into tiny handbags, printed onto wallpaper, emblazoned on cell-phone cases: there is no object in our world that is safe from this tropical fruit. Much like the peace signs and smiley faces of the '70s, the daisies of the '90s, and how we "put a bird on it" in the mid-aughts, the pineapple has emerged as the icon that will represent the times we live in now.
But where did it all start?
Historically, the pineapple started out as a status symbol, as it was one of the fruits Christopher Columbus and other European explorers were bringing back from the Americas. It took a couple hundred years for the Europeans to learn how to grow the fruit — it was Barbara Palmer, mistress of King Charles II, who eventually started growing them in her "hot house" in the late-seventeenth century. Which is to say, having a pineapple in your home was a big deal. So much so that at the time, there was a rent-a-pineapple system, so multiple hostesses could take turns displaying the foreign fruit in their home. Throughout the years, as pineapples became more accessible, they no longer represented status and instead became symbols of hospitality.
Bring up the pineapple among a group of 21st-century fashion aficionados, however, and inevitably they will all mention Stella McCartney's spring 2001 collection for the French label Chloé. The collection perfectly married Stella's youthful, cheeky approach to the world of "high fashion," as seen on halter maillots with pineapple prints strategically placed at the crotch.
The collection was iconic not only because of its instantly recognizable emblems, but because it cemented Stella's status as a designer whose point of view mattered. Although she had been at the helm of the label since 1997, the fact that she was then 25 and fresh out of design school, and that she was taking over for the recently ousted Karl Lagerfeld, meant that there was a lot of skepticism over her appointment. (Karl famously said to Women's Wear Daily back then,"I think they should have taken a big name. They did — but in music, not fashion. Let's hope she is as gifted as her father.") She would leave Chloé to start her namesake label a year after that.
Weirdly enough, Stella was not the only one in a pineapple state of mind that season. Yves Saint Laurent, who was still designing his couture label at the time, also sent out glamorous gowns embellished with pineapple prints on his runway for spring 2001.
It would be enough to blame the resurgence of this print on the recent bout of early '00s nostalgia (see also the renewed popularity of Juicy Couture sweat suits, and Paris Hilton–Nicole Richie–The Simple Life nostalgia), but it's a bit more obvious than that. You see, for spring 2013, Chloé released a special capsule collection featuring its "greatest hits" as part of its 60th-anniversary celebration. You can guess that the pineapple collection made the cut.
As the so-called fast-fashion stores continuously get their inspiration from the high-fashion runways, it's no surprise that the pineapple made its way to the masses once again. In 2001, I definitely owned a white tee with a sequined pineapple on the front, and I'm sure it wouldn't take me very long to find a similar style today. But I think there's another reason why the pineapple is still so prevalent: After all, is it really possible that a collection from 2001, revived in 2013, could still have such an intense effect on the trends four years later?
While we know that florals for spring are not actually groundbreaking, the springtime fruit print is like its cousin, coming out every year, hustling hard to be seen with various degrees of success. And through various cultural factors, it is the pineapple that is still standing after the fast-moving periods of wokeness we have been going through of late.
Let me explain. You have bananas, but other than their short-lived success thanks to Gwen Stefani's spelling lessons in 2004, they've never quite taken off as a print. Also because they are shorthand for penis. Then we have cherries, but they have a sort of "bad reputation" for a fruit, a classic flash-tattoo design favored by those with retro sensibilities. Also because they have become a stand-in for cooters, even though they don't actually resemble them at all. Meanwhile, their bright-red relative the strawberry has cornered the little-girl market thanks to Strawberry Shortcake (which also means there's a Lolita factor in there, but let's not get into that, OK?).
So that leaves us with the pineapple.
The pineapple is the feminist fruit of our times. Stay with me here. Yes, you can playfully joke that a pineapple is a vag, but it isn't a friendly vag! There are spikes to get around, cutting into them takes a bit of practice, and if you don't know how to eat them right, the rind will fuck up the corner of your mouth (sorry, was that too much?).
The pineapple, which started out as a status symbol for colonizers, became a stand-in for comfort and hospitality. And then, after a young female designer turned it into the "I am woman, hear me roar"statement of her still-budding career, it's now the primary motif of, dare I say it … the post-Trump era.
WHOA.
Laia Garcia loves piña coladas (and getting caught in the rain). | | | | | | | | | | | | Have-Tos and Want-Tos | | | | By Anna Quindlen | | |
"Wo ai ni."That's the sentence I will always remember. Perhaps over time I will forget how to say "When are you free?" ("Ni shenme shihou youkong?") or "I like Chinese food" ("Wo xihuan chi zhongguo cai").
But I will never forget how to say "Wo ai ni," or forget what it means.
My husband and I are studying Mandarin. "Oh, that's wonderful," people say. No, it's not. It's terrible. Except for the lovely young woman who is our tutor and is unfailingly positive in the face of homework noncompliance (him) and dreadful tonal pronunciations (mine), there's nothing wonderful about it. It's a hard language to learn, nothing like our native tongue or the one we studied in school, which enables us to buy things in Paris and order from a pretentious menu.
And we are learning it for the sake of a little boy who can't even speak yet. Our first grandchild will grow up bilingual, one set of grandparents born in Beijing, parents both fluent in Chinese. I will be Nai nai as well as Nana.
Arthur, ni xiang qu gongyuan ma? That means, Arthur, would you like to go to the park? At least I think it does. Someday a small boy will say to me, Nana (or Nai nai), your Chinese is terrible!
Here's the thing about loving people: you wind up acting in two distinct ways when you do. There are the things you do because you have to. And there are the things you do because you want to. Over time, the balance between the two makes the difference between something that is a helium balloon and something that sinks to the floor and begins to wrinkle, the remnants of a party that is over for sure.
Hasn't it happened to all of us? You have this friend, and you love her and she you, and you tell each other almost everything and text each other dozens of times a day. She needs you to meet this guy to see if he's as nice as she thinks. She asks you to look at apartments to see what she should rent. She wants you to come to her party, and give her some work advice, and lend you that dress you have, the one the two of you got together at that cute little place and you can't believe that it was on sale!
And over time, something happens: the things you have to do — because she insists, because she won't take no for an answer, because she will have hurt feelings and suddenly the texts will stop — overwhelm the things you want to do. Eventually you don't want to do anything much for her anymore. And that's when the friendship goes south.
This desire, and this balance, changes over time. When I was in my first year of college, I met a guy whom I really wanted to impress. I was a fledgling feminist, which may explain why I decided one weekend when he was away to clean his dorm room. (He was away seeing his high-school girlfriend. That's a different essay.) His room wasn't particularly filthy, especially by the standards of college-age men. I did it because it was so counterintuitive, me as maid, that I thought it would telegraph that I was so sold on him that I wanted to do things that no one would ever expect me to want to do.
That guy is my husband, and I cannot count how many years — no, decades — it's been since I wanted to clean on his account. There are things I do for him because I want to — cooking is one of them, not because I love to cook but because I love to feed people — but cleaning is not one of them.
Now, I'm not saying that some part of loving someone is not doing over and over again the mundane tasks that no one really likes to do. I was at home with my younger siblings and my mother when she was terminally ill. I basically hated everything I had to do then: make meatloaf, drive to the hospital, do laundry, handle the morphine, what I thought of as the have-tos of a suburban housewife if the suburban housewife happened to have ovarian cancer.
And today I wouldn't change any of it for the world, except that I would have been less obvious in my lack of enjoyment. I suppose those months helped prepare me for motherhood. So much of being a parent is about the scut work you have to do: feeding, changing, simply showing up. So much of motherhood is about having to do things that, in retrospect, you realize you were glad you did, not only for their sake but for your own.
A lot of the want-tos sneak in around the margins. Changing a poopy diaper is a have-to; singing an invented-on-the-spot song about the poopy diaper, or blowing raspberries into a belly button after thoroughly cleaning up the poopy diaper, is a want-to. Feeding is a have-to; making airplane noises while moving the spoon is a want-to. I suppose the different between being a parent and enjoying being a parent is how many have-tos you manage to turn into want-tos on any given day.
Because there's nothing to kill a love affair, or a friendship, or even a family relationship, like that feeling that it's all obligation and no options. Learning Mandarin is a want-to. In fact, it turns out that, unlike being a mother, being a grandmother is much more about the things you want to do than the things you have to do. Maybe that's why so many people talk about it as though it's the best thing that can happen to you. I get to choose what I want to do for my grandson. His parents have to — have to put him down for bed every night, have to take him to the pediatrician, have to make sure there are diapers and little socks and a sippy cup. Since they are the bread, I can be the cake.
By the way, "Wo ai ni" means "I love you." But maybe you already figured that out.
Anna Quindlen has written eight novels, all best-sellers, including Miller's Valley, which has just been released by Random House in paperback. As a columnist at the New York Times, she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. | | | | | | | | | | | | Fresh-Face Finder | | | | By Tahirah Hairston | | | |
Kim Coleman doesn't really do interviews, but she's made an exception because, full disclosure, I'm good friends with her daughter, Winter. She doesn't really do parties either, unless they are related to her work or supporting her peers. That's because she considers herself to be more of a behind-the-scenes type. As an independent casting director, her job is never-ending. She had to reschedule our interview twice due to a crisis with an ABC pilot she was casting, and during our hour-long Sunday chat, she revealed to me that Spike Lee had called her ten times. Along with Lee, Kim has cultivated relationships with some of Hollywood's most famed directors and producers, so it's not surprising that her phone never stops ringing.
For the past twenty years, Kim has played an integral role in diversifying films and television series like American Crime, Akeelah and the Bee, and Everybody Hates Chris. She regularly collaborates with Lee, casting films like She Hate Me and Chiraq, and she's helped bring to life cult movies including The Cheetah Girls, Beauty Shop, and three Madea-franchise films. This season alone, Kim is behind the casting for the Netflix projects Dear White People, She's Gotta Have It, and Burning Sands.
In her many years in the industry, it's clear that Kim has broadened the stage for brown and black actors, giving newcomers like Trevante Rhodes, Shameik Moore, DeWanda Wise, and Kiersey Clemons a chance to shine. We chatted about how she got her start in entertainment, building confidence in your ideas, and how the industry has opened up to diversity.
Tahirah Hairston: What's your first film or television memory?
Kim Coleman: I don't know my first memory, but one of the strongest is making sandwiches and watching Love Boat and Love American Style with my grandmother. We were very close. We loved watching TV together. At the end of certain TV shows and films, I would see "casting by," and I would see his name, Lynn Stalmaster. I was like, Oh my God. Who is she? That's when I first became aware of casting. When I went to look her up, I found out it was a guy. Lynn Stalmaster is one of the most innovative in casting.
TH: How did you start working in the entertainment industry?
KC: My then-boyfriend, now husband and I decided to move to Los Angeles together when I was 20. We caught a Greyhound bus, started in San Diego, and eventually moved to Los Angeles. I came to LA to take a job at the shop Giorgio Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive. I went from retail to the entertainment business when I joined the accounting department at Creative Artists Agency. Then, an agent friend of mine told me that the casting department was looking for an intern. I went to meet Billy Hopkins, the very well-respected casting director. He said, "Look, I can't pay you, but if you want to learn the business, this is how you learn it." So I worked for free. He taught me everything about casting. I was his right hand.
TH: Two of the Oscar-winning black actors from last season were Viola Davis and Mahershala Ali, who didn't get their big breaks until they were 40-plus. In an interview with GQ, Mahershala said it was hard for black actors to get cast based on their potential. How have you seen the opportunities for black actors change over the years?
KC: Right now, if you're an African American actor, you're in demand. Over the last two years, when I do my availability list, there's so many black actors who are not available. I understand what Mahershala is saying: I think there was a time maybe four or five years ago that, as casting directors, we would say to our producers or directors or writers, "Well, this role that might be written for a white actor, what if they're brown or black?" Sometimes there would be some hesitation, but I think that day has passed. Now I think everyone is open to who the best actor is for the role.
TH: What do you think caused the industry shift?
KC: I think part of it is that there's more content being created right now, which brings more diversity to the screen. The world is different now, and that is a huge part of it. I don't think there ever was a situation where folks were saying, "Oh, no, no, no, I don't want to put black actors in my TV show, in my film." I just think most people are more educated now. As casting directors, we have to educate our team to let them know this actor's work or worth.
TH: Being a woman who does call the shots in an industry that is male-dominated, how did you learn to hold your own and not get walked over?
KC: Part of it is experience — being confident in who you are and what you bring to the table comes from experience. If I feel very strongly about an actor and maybe my producer or my director feels differently, I will voice my opinion. One thing you have to keep in mind in this business is that we're all a small piece of the puzzle. Everybody respects everybody's input, and that makes a big difference.
TH: The upcoming Netflix series She's Gotta Have It is a television version of a cult Spike Lee classic. Did you feel the pressure in making the casting decisions? You went for newcomers, like the lead, DeWanda Wise.
KC: When I was auditioning actresses, including her, this character needs a certain gravitas, and DeWanda just brought it to the table. I auditioned many actresses for that part, and she was someone we could not get out of our heads. The movie has such a following and a pedigree that Spike was like, "We gotta do this right." Each one of the guys had to have the same quality that made the movie successful. I know who's out there, and I didn't want to see the same old faces. With the great Spike Lee, I'm always nervous when I'm working with him, as with all my other directors and producers. I always tell all of them — I tell Tyler Perry, Oprah, all of them — my job is not to get fired.
TH: You've cast so many great black TV shows and movies, like She Hate Me, Dope, and Everybody Hates Chris. Do you intentionally pick projects where you know you'll be expanding the stories of black people on-screen?
KC: I don't intentionally choose those projects. It just so happens that a lot of people who ask me to join their team are creating that content. Movies and TV and stage presentations are a collaborative process. A person has a vision and surrounds themselves with others willing to pursue bringing that vision to life.
TH: Would you say that you try to make sure that the show or film that you're casting is diverse?
KC: Absolutely. If I read the script, I don't just read every role and say every role could be black or every role could be white. I'm always looking for diversity. I think when it fits and when it feels right, that's my take on it. A lot of times it's not just all about race. It's about putting the ensemble together.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Tahirah Hairston is a culture writer living in Brooklyn. | | | | | | | | | | | | Adventures of Lesbian Cattle Dogs | | | | By Lydia Conklin | | |
Lydia Conklin is the 2015–2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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