Guernica Magazine

“The shaming and incarceration of Patricia Ann Prewitt.”

“On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.”

“You wondered out loud what writing “multiculturally” actually meant and what kind of black man would write the word “bro” in an email.”

Shelter in place has given The Best American Travel Writing series editor a lot of time to think about travel writing’s future, and whether pandemic will move travel writers’ focus closer to home.

“I never knew my uncle. But it’s the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.”

“It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me.”

In this beautiful and poignant essay, the writer Crystal Hana Kim considers how translating her grandmother’s poems from Korean to English helped her appreciate the imprecision of language not as barrier to be transversed, but as an opportunity for new connection between herself, her mother, and her grandmother.

As Mary Heglar remembers Hurricane Katrina — which hit the day after the 50th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till — she considers how racism and climate change are inextricably linked.

“The pain was incandescent: a sticky, piercing heat that felt a knife’s edge from ecstasy; it sent spasm after spasm through my limbs as I clung to the hospital sheets, straining toward the ceiling, yearning for the sky beyond it. I was half-gone, floating up to the cosmos, desperate for the frigid vastness of space, for my body to shatter into pieces and just float undisturbed, finally, finally. Back on earth, I was tethered, spread, split decisively open. My daughter slid from me, indignant, slick and firm as a plum, and stopped wailing as soon as they nestled her on my chest.”