I’m sitting on the levee, watching the canal bleed into the Mississippi River. As I sit, I look at the other side, the West Bank,
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“I like pleasure spiked with pain” —Red Hot Chili Peppers Sometimes, I limp. Whether it’s from the cold, or a run, or just existing, I
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Two months ago, I was in Miami, my hometown. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t tell most of my peoples. For
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It is March, and we are in a pandemic, and I have been writing dark things all morning: about my family’s exile from Cuba, about
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They say after you protest, you should isolate for two weeks like you got the virus. In New Orleans, I protested following the murder of
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Niyi Osundare has a line in his 2011 book City Without People: The Katrina Poems that goes, “Enia lasoo mi,” which translates from Yoruba to English as,
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Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s debut novel, We Cast a Shadow, follows a nameless narrator who tries to protect his son from the dangers of the world. The narrator
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Arséne DeLay is a person who can stop you in your tracks with her big laugh. Or, you might first notice her big and colorful
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Every time I go back home, I barbecue for all my peoples in Miami. It was ritual when I lived down there. It is ritual
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My first night in New Orleans eight years ago was a dream. I followed a bassist who lugged his instrument from bar to bar on
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My father and I joke, that anytime we read anything about Cuba, we can tell the politics of the writer within the first two lines
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I had just moved to New Orleans and was at a second line when I first saw a Baby Doll. She was dressed in a blue satin
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My father is an immigrant. He left Cuba at the age of eleven. Being in Miami meant he could see his island from the Keys.
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It’s there. Driving to Donald Trump’s rally at the New Orleans Lakefront Airport, I can feel it. As a Cuban-American male in the United States, I’ve
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Adrian Van Young’s debut novel Shadows in Summerland (ChiZine Publications, 2016) begins with William Mumler, a spirit for photographer, in prison as he is awaiting trial. Mumler has
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If you live in New Orleans (or have an HBO GO password), you are probably familiar with some aspects of Mardi Gras Indians. The suits,
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“I see you still got it up?” I was talking to my neighbor, local writer and woman-about-town Pamela Davis-Noland, when someone leaving her house asked
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The plaque on the Jose Marti statue on Jefferson Davis Parkway and Banks Street reads (in Spanish): “From the Cuban exiles and their friends in
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When I first read about NOLA FOR LIFE’s Midnight Basketball, I remember thinking that I wish they had that in my neighborhood when I was
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September 25, 2006. Seventy-five thousand people packed into the Superdome to watch the first football game in New Orleans in nearly 21 months. With the
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