On Sunday night, “Moonlight” won the Oscar for “Best Picture” in what’s easily the most memorable moment in the award show’s history.

First, the presumed winner for that category, “La La Land,” erroneously “won.” Then the Academy slowly informed the room that there had been a mistake and “Moonlight” had actually earned the award. In what remains an internal mystery, presenters for this final and most prestigious award, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, walked onstage with the wrong card to reveal the winner.

Despite this turmoil, “Moonlight” deservedly came out on top. In an aggregate for the movies critics thought were the best in 2016, “Moonlight” was solidly in first place. The movie also got at 98 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

So how did the people behind “Moonlight” make such a widely-beloved movie?

In large part, the key was authenticity, which is often the case with great art.

As various creators of “Moonlight” describe in the above exclusive video provided to The Huffington Post, much care was devoted to basing this movie on reality from start to finish.

Co-screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney based the story largely on his early life in Miami, while director and co-screenwriter Barry Jenkins came from a similar situation in Miami. Then, the creators chose to integrate the city deeply into the movie.

“Tarell’s writing just described Miami in a way that I hadn’t seen described before,” Jenkins said at the beginning of the clip. “It was personal.”

In the clip, producer Adele Romanski further expanded on what Jenkins brought to the job. “It’s where he grew up,” said Romanski. “We were filming on blocks that he used to live on.”

Jenkins apparently wanted much of the supporting cast to be from Miami and had a desire to make sure his crew was truly knowledgeable about the area, as well. “He’d share some of his experiences with the crew,” explained Romanski, to help ground the people working on the movie and help them connect with the neighborhood.

In a bit longer explanation, Jenkins said:

There’s so many biographical elements in this movie. The only way I could see them being represented in their most authentic form was to place them against the backdrop that inspired them, which was Miami. 

“Moonlight” is available on Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital Tuesday.

Here’s the trailer:

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This February, parents, educators and entertainers have celebrated Black History Month with lessons about hidden figures, original pieces of art and other powerful tributes.

“Sesame Street” honored black history by unearthing some old clips from its archive. The show shared three vintage clips featuring black icons like Maya Angelou, Ray Charles and Erykah Badu on YouTube.

A spokesperson for the show told The Huffington Post that representation is a very important part of “Sesame Street,” which has featured a diverse cast and stories about appreciating differences and similarities throughout its 47-year history.

“Celebrating diversity and inclusion is in our DNA,” she said. “Studies show that kids engage and learn more fully when they see themselves reflected onscreen, and ‘Sesame Street’ is for ALL children around the world.”

The spokesperson added that they’re always looking for more ways to be inclusive and recently launched a fellowship program to bring more diverse voices into the writers’ room.

“We know the power our characters have to reach and teach children – and influence their behavior,” she told HuffPost. “Beyond ABCs and 123s, our program delivers lessons including inclusivity, mutual respect and understanding – which are critical lessons for developing kindness, empathy, and compassion.”

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J.K. Rowling — British author and master of a fire Twitter burn — is proving she’s also a great hype queen.

On Monday, she tweeted a photo that features a fraction of a script she’s writing (or has already written?) with a super tease-y caption:

What’s in the script isn’t exactly clear, but that seems to be Rowling’s intent.

If one wanted to get all sleuth-y and Hermione-like, the combination of Rowling’s “beastly” caption and words like “Warner Bros.” and “confidential” visible on the script makes it fair to assume that this could possibly be the next installment of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

Especially since Rowling has stated that she intends to make the movies — which are based on Newt Scamander’s “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” a textbook used by Harry and his peers at Hogwarts — into a trilogy.

Yet, whether this a finished script, one Rowling is still working on, or a “Fantastic Beast” script at all, is as clear as someone under an invisibility cloak.

Due to the ambiguity, her fans have reactions. For instance, some are simply excited that the new script for “Fantastic Beasts” may already be written:

Others, however, were not fans of Rowling’s tease:

And the rest, well, they just had QUESTIONS:

One Twitter user summed it up perfectly when she said this:

But will that ever change? Probably not.

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Critics have described Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” ― the stunning film awarded Best Picture at the Academy Awards on Sunday ― as a cinematic poem, in part because of its masterful score, stretches of silence, and piercing use of color. 

A ballet-infused dance inspired by the motion picture, choreographed by Robert Battle of New York’s Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, distills the movie’s poetic essence into two minutes of ecstatic movement. 

Under a blue luminosity reminiscent of the moon’s glare, dancers Jamar Roberts, Christopher Taylor and Jeremy T. Villas move to the film’s rapturous score, created by Academy Award-nominated composer Nicholas Britell. 

The three dancers represent the film’s protagonist, Chiron, at various phases of his life ― childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Their bodies communicate Chiron’s struggle to understand and accept himself, trembling back and forth between expression and suppression without saying a word.

In the video, directed by by Anna Rose Holmer of 2016’s “The Fits,” the dazzling blue light illuminates the dancing figures, their every facial expression and undulating muscle telling a unique story. Like the film, Holmer’s short revels in the sensuality and sensitivity of the dancers, qualities which are often overlooked in stereotypical depictions of black men.

Bask in the glow of “Moonlight”s excellence over and over again with the video above, courtesy of Nowness. 

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For over nine years, Wendel White has been venturing to countless museums throughout the U.S. to photograph historical black artifacts for his “Manifest” photo series.

From a lock of Frederick Douglass’ hair and FBI files on Malcolm X to a tambourine once played by Prince, White’s collection of nearly 100 photos allows for continual consumption of black history. 

“[The title] ‘Manifest’ evokes the complicated notions of slavery as cargo or inventory and the notion that these objects are also a collection or reliquary of African-American experience and memory,” White, who currently resides in New Jersey, told The Huffington Post last week.

He said that historical black artifacts are often overlooked by most museums. 

“My photographs are meant to describe and materialize the experience of encountering objects that have been traveling through time stored in cabinets, on shelves and in warehouses for centuries or just a few years,” White said.

“I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit these material remains,” he continued. “The ability of objects to transcend lives, centuries and millennia suggests a remarkable mechanism for folding time, bringing the past and the present into a shared space that is uniquely suited to artistic exploration.”  

Wendel ― who’s been collecting for the “Manifest” series since 2008 ― finds his subjects through research and suggestions from friends. While some of his material is gathered from private archives, the majority of it comes from public collections. 

“Manifest” was first exhibited at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and has since been on display at museums across the country. A number of the collection’s newer additions are from exhibits at the highly buzzed-about National Museum of African American History and Culture, including a piece of stained glass destroyed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama, which killed four young girls. 

White said the remnant was “one of the most painful objects” he’s photographed. 

Take a look at some of the most striking images from the “Manifest” portfolio below:

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is unveiling the hidden figures of Africa’s history in his latest docu-series, “Africa’s Great Civilizations.”

Told through an assortment of analysis, interviews and personal exploration, the three-part, six hour PBS documentary series finds the Harvard professor chronicling 200,000 years of Africa’s history and culture. Five years in the making, the series explores everything from the rise of Shaka Zulu to the transformation of South Africa thanks to gold and diamonds, to King Lalibela’s reign in Ethiopia to the spread of Christianity throughout the continent.

The Emmy Award-winner wanted the docu-series to stand as an accurate exploration into the complex history of Africa’s kingdoms and empires. “Africa has been recognized as the ultimate ‘other,’ the negation of the West,” Gates told The Huffington Post. “And that started when the slave trade reached its zenith and it got even worse when the colonial era started after 1884 and the Berlin Conference, when the Europeans just carved up Africa, as if there was no people living there, and just gave chunks of it to each other. And so they created an image of African people as subhuman, primitive, static, and soulless.”

“People thought not only were Africans primitive and savage, but isolated,” he continued. “And what we show is, over and over again, some parts of Africa were in contact with the larger world. The Africans were just as curious about people outside of Africa, just as much as people outside of Africa were about Africans.”

To help bring Africa’s wealth of untold history into education curriculum, Gates is currently developing an educational site with the PBS network, in addition to writing a companion book to the series with historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood, which will be released next year.

“We’re trying to reeducate the American people. All of us have been let down by the school system,” Gates said. “My goal is to get the history of the people of color integrated into school systems. Whether it’s 200,000 years of African history or the last 500 years of African American history, or the last 50 years of African American history, that’s my dream.“

The three-night premiere of “Africa’s Great Civilizations” airs Feb. 27 on PBS at 9/8c.

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The Oscar flub heard ‘round the world may have happened because of a tweet, reports say.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers spokesperson confirmed to The Huffington Post that Brian Cullinan, a managing partner at PwC, was responsible for handing Warren Beatty the wrong envelope, which led to the Best Picture winner debacle. 

Three minutes before the envelope was handed off, Cullinan tweeted out a photo of Emma Stone with her new Oscar.

Cullinan shared the since-deleted tweet at 9:05 p.m. PT ― Beatty and co-presenter Faye Dunaway would take the stage to present Best Picture at 9:08pm PST. 

The archived tweet can be seen below: 

Cullinan accidentally gave Beatty a duplicate copy of the envelope containing Stone’s name as Best Actress. That duplicate was supposed to be thrown away. Not realizing it was the wrong envelope, Dunaway announced “La La Land” as the winner, when “Moonlight” was actually the Academy’s choice.

In a blog written for The Huffington Post earlier this year, Cullinan indicated that he and Martha Ruiz, another accountant responsible for the envelopes, “don’t leave for the entire show ― not even for a bathroom break!”

“We’re so focused on doing our jobs that we don’t mind the hours of standing,” he said.

Cullinan also told HuffPost mere days ago that it would be “so unlikely” for a presenter to announce the wrong winner.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has already issued a statement regarding the mishap, but there has been no word from Cullinan on what happened or why he deleted his tweets. 

The PwC spokesperson would “not comment on Brian’s tweet,” but we will keep an eye out for any other updates.

UPDATE: The Academy released a statement Monday night apologizing for the Best Picture snafu, saying it had spent the day investigating what went wrong and will decide on the next steps. 

We deeply regret the mistakes that were made during the presentation of the Best Picture category during last night’s Oscar ceremony ... For the last 83 years, the Academy has entrusted PwC to handle the critical tabulation process, including the accurate delivery of results. PwC has taken full responsibility for the breaches of established protocols that took place during the ceremony. We have spent last night and today investigating the circumstances, and will determine what actions are appropriate going forward. 

Head over to Medium to read The Academy’s statement in full.

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Jimmy Kimmel kicked off the Oscars Sunday night with a joke that perfectly skewered the Trump administration’s treatment of minority groups, and it was met with rapturous applause. 

“I want to thank President Trump,” Kimmel quipped. “I mean, remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars were racist?” 

As political jokes go, Kimmel succeeded in lampooning the problematic systemic treatment of marginalized communities. And he should have stuck with that formula. Instead, his jokes ended up lampooning the marginalized communities themselves. 

Against a backdrop of industry diversity wins, the trappings of inculcated nativism behind Kimmel’s jokes felt painfully obvious.

On Twitter, viewers called Kimmel out on some major uncomfortable instances that made ethnic groups feel “othered,” or that they don’t belong. Against a backdrop of industry diversity wins, the trappings of inculcated nativism behind Kimmel’s jokes felt painfully obvious. 

Sunday’s awards show saw the most diverse group of recipients in Oscars history. A record number of black stars won. The world celebrated the achievements of “Moonlight.” And the speeches were politically charged, with actors and directors speaking in favor of differences and against divisive walls.  

But then Kimmel used Mahershala Ali’s name as the butt of two different jokes.

Kimmel made a comment about the Best Supporting Actor award recipient’s newborn daughter’s name, saying that with a name like Mahershala, “You can’t name her Amy.”

Ali is the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar. He adheres to Ahmadiyya, a sect of Islam that has been historically persecuted. So, he could probably have done without Kimmel’s jokes designating him as different, as people on Twitter pointed out. 

Kimmel also highlighted Ali’s name when he asked the audience to yell out “Mahershala” during the tour bus skit.

Kimmel also made fun of Asian names during the same skit. When an Asian woman in the tour group told Kimmel her name was Yulree, he turned the joke on her. When Yulree’s husband stated right after that his name was Patrick, Kimmel said: “See, that’s a name.”

In another moment that had some viewers shaking their heads, Kimmel lifted up “Lion” star Sunny Pawar, channeling the iconic “Lion King” scene in which Simba is held up over a cliff. It felt utterly well-intentioned, and the 8-year-old’s reaction even tugged at the heartstrings. 

But as some viewers pointed out, the image of Kimmel, a white host, holding up a brown child who doesn’t speak English as a prop in a skit with African-inspired music playing has racial undertones that are impossible to ignore. 

These instances of cultural insensitivity were reminiscent of last year’s awards when racist jokes against Asians played out on the Oscars stage. The Academy apologized after the fact. 

It seems that instead of reactive apologies, there’s a more proactive solution: More diversity is needed behind the scenes and among show stakeholders. Hollywood will hopefully continue to give us even more reasons to celebrate diversity at awards shows in the future. The last thing we need is for the shows themselves to detract from that in the future.

So in other words, no more recaps like this, please: 

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In the wilds of this year’s Oscar race, “La La Land” and “Moonlight” were pitched as bitter rivals. In actuality, they were more like competitive pals. Frenemies, if you will. 

As “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz said Sunday upon realizing his film had not actually won Best Picture, “I’m going to be really thrilled to hand this to my friends from ‘Moonlight.’” Horowitz waved director Barry Jenkins and company to the podium without a hint of resentment, despite having just been informed that presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty announced the wrong winner. 

The exchange was a gracious encapsulation of a monthslong Best Picture contest that assumed complex layers amid Donald Trump’s election. The media’s analyses painted “Moonlight” as the socially conscious contender whose victory would double as Trump resistance, rendering “La La Land” a fantasy frolic doused in Hollywood nostalgia. But as these things go, our armchair narratives outpaced what was happening among the people actually involved with the movies. Having seen one another at event after event since September’s big festivals and the subsequent awards blitz, it turns out the competitors might actually like each other. 

Representing a small independent film about a black, gay latchkey kid in the Miami projects, Jenkins has remained neighborly throughout the long haul. In fact, he first demonstrated affection for “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle when their movies premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September. 

And again when the musical enjoyed stellar returns during its first weekend in theaters.

After a Twitter user lamented that “La La Land” would likely topple “Moonlight” for awards, Jenkins politely protested. 

When I talked to Jenkins about his Golden Globe nominations a few days after “La La Land” opened, he called the movie one of his favorites of 2016. “’La La Land’ is an amazing film,” he later told Esquire, defending it against criticisms. “I think there’s a very superficial read of ‘La La Land’ that does injustice to what Damien’s doing in the film, and it’s convenient because these are tough times to make a superficial read of that film. But it’s like, no, this is America. This is what this shit is. You gain something; you sacrifice something else in the gaining of that thing. I mean, that’s dark stuff.”

The “sacrifice” to which Jenkins alludes is Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) ending their relationship to pursue professional fulfillment, which some interpret as a cynical take on romance. Jenkins’ implicit candor about the nature of awards season ― in which movies with little in common are pitted against each other for the sake of trophies ― marks a respite from the mudslinging and strategizing that dominate Oscar derbies. 

The “La La Land” crew exhibited similar grace. While accepting the Golden Globes’ screenwriting prize in January, Chazelle said of his fellow nominees, “One of the actual benefits of this whole rodeo of awards season is getting to meet people whose work you really admire, so all of you, I’m in awe of your work and I’m humbled to be up here.” The telecast cut to Jenkins nodding along as Chazelle spoke. Ryan Gosling, seemingly amused by Sunday’s mishap, threw his arms around actor Ashton Sanders as the “Moonlight” crew congregated onstage. Nearby, Best Supporting Actor winner Mahershala Ali embraced “La La Land” producer Fred Berger. In the press room backstage, Emma Stone said, “I think we all would have loved to win Best Picture, but we are so excited for ‘Moonlight.’ I think it’s one of the best films of all time, so I was pretty beside myself.” 

At the Governors Ball after the ceremony, members of the “Moonlight” and “La La Land” clans reportedly hugged one another. “It was a surreal, kind of out-of-body experience,” Horowitz told The New York Times. “We’ve been on the circuit with them for six months. If that kind of thing has to happen, I’m glad to give it to them.”

Of course, we can’t know what any of these people really think of the “Moonlight”-”La La” two-hander. But assuming their reactions aren’t just calculated attempts at sportsmanship, the camps’ positive repartee is the exclamation point to a heated Best Picture race defined by Hollywood’s damning statistics about inclusivity and on-screen representation. Some of the Monday-morning quarterbacking has called Horowitz “brave” for announcing Beatty and Dunaway’s mistake, which undercuts “Moonlight” as the rightful winner. Stating a fact on live television is not brave, but Horowitz was gracious and warm in welcoming the other team to take his place, and that counts for a lot. He held up the card inside the proper envelope so the world could see “Moonlight” printed on it. Despite whatever disappointment the “La La Land” personnel felt, it was a rare moment of unity in a cutthroat industry. 

And the affection goes beyond praising one another’s films. About half an hour after the Oscars ended, “La La Land” co-star and producer John Legend praised the “team” from “Moonlight.” On Monday morning, Horowitz tweeted about the “beautiful people” involved with the movie, which he had called “excellent” back in September.

We can now close the books on the 89th Oscar relay having crowned a progressive indie underdog that probably wouldn’t have been made 15 years ago. It is, in a sense, a demonstration against the Trump administration, which has exemplified disregard for the sorts of marginalized voices depicted in “Moonlight.” And for those of us who have watched this pony race from the sidelines, it is a vote for what we love most: celebrating the city of stars that provides both escapism and life-affirming mirrors of our planet’s diverse realities. On to the next one!

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Many people may see the rise of black dancers like Misty Copeland, Olivia Boisson and Jasmine Perry as a new phenomenon. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Dance instructor Theresa Ruth Howard saw a void in available information about the black trailblazers of ballet. So she created Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet (MoBBallet), a platform that highlights the work of black dancers past and present.  

“The contributions and achievements of black ballet dancers have always been poorly documented and preserved, to begin with, having never enjoyed equity of importance or reporting,” Howard told The Huffington Post via email, noting that there has recently been “an erasure of the actual history and legacy of black ballet dancers.”

“There was something in the present-day narrative that was myopic, a single story that was not reflective of the fact that there have been [black] ballet dancers in America for decades,” she continued.   

MoBBallet includes an interactive timeline tracing significant events in the history of black ballet starting at 1919. In addition, Howard is using a $50,000 Knight Foundation grant to create an online exhibition of some of Philadelphia’s first black ballerinas, including Joan Myers Brown, Delores Browne and Judith Jamison. 

The Philadelphia native said the fact that these and other dancers (such as Christina Johnson, Lowell Smith and Donald Williams) and primarily black institutions that fostered their careers (e.g. the Dance Theatre of Harlem) go overlooked is “insulting” and “makes the cannon itself incomplete.” 

 “There is ‘American history’ and then there is ‘black history’ when in truth it is one and the same,” Howard told HuffPost. “When you look at the contributions of black ballet dancers ... in the macro ... it explains a great deal about why there are so ‘few’ black ballet dancers and ... will evoke a greater amount of respect, understanding and appreciation for what has been accomplished in the face of things like the legalized oppression, segregation and systematic exclusion.”

Howard, who’s an alumna of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, said that she hopes MoBBallet can help to create the next generation of black ballet dancers while ensuring their contributions don’t get erased. 

I wanted to show that black ballet dancers are not unicorns, there is not just ONE, there are hundreds. I wanted to make the invisible visible.
Theresa Howard, curator of MoBBallet

Howard and her advisory board are taking steps toward this goal by featuring black dancers and trainers on a crowdsourced list titled “Roll Call,” which currently highlights 301 artists. Howard said she will also be presenting video profiles of dancers, teachers and directors.

“I wanted to show that black ballet dancers are not unicorns, there is not just ONE, there are hundreds. I wanted to make the invisible visible,” she said.

Through history lessons, digital exhibits, Roll Call and an e-magazine, Howard would like MoBBallet to be a source of inspiration and conversation that leads to a better representation of black dancers in the world of ballet.

“The beauty in the true and full legacy of black ballet artists is that EVERYONE and EVERYTHING is represented, from fair skinned to dark chocolate, short, tall, thick, svelte, muscular to delicate,” she said. “When you look at the spectrum you can find someone who looks like you, hence someone to identify with and aspire to.”

Howard said that if this part of history is more widely acknowledged, it “could change the perception of who does ballet, who should do ballet and what ballet looks like.” 

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If 2017 was a poem, what would you call it?

This was the question Tabia Yapp ― the founder of BEOTIS, a boutique agency that represents leading writers, speakers and multidisciplinary artists of color ― posed to a group of contemporary poets she admired. 

The open-ended question provided respondents with ample space to play. Some poets answered the prompt in two words, while others filled up pages, all while attempting to describe a time categorized by so much fear, anger, hope, action and love.  

We’re only two months into 2017. At times, it feels like the year has already stretched beyond its 12-month boundaries. Yet at the same time, 2017 still doesn’t feel quite real. Just as Black History Month comes to a close, the following poets are helping us make sense of this uncertain moment in history, using language as a guide. 

Behold, 34 poets of color summarize 2017 in verse*:

 1. Alok Vaid-Menon

Alok Vaid-Menon is a nonbinary artist with a lot of feelings.

2. Camonghne Felix

Camonghne Felix, M.A., is a poet, political strategist, media junkie and cultural worker. She received an M.A. in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo and Poets House. The 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee is the author of the chapbook Yolk, and was recently listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl From the Future You Should Know.”

3. Yosimar Reyes  

Yosimar Reyes is an undocumented American poet and activist, who was born in Guerrero, Mexico, and raised in East San Jose, California.

4. Ada Limón 

Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry including Bright Dead Things which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry award, and named one of the top 10 books of the year by The New York Times.

5. Hieu Minh Nguyen

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the son of immigrants. He is the author of two collections of poetry, This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, forthcoming in 2018).

6. Fatimah Asghar

Fatimah Asghar is a Kundiman Fellow and a member of the Dark Noise Collective. She is the author of the chapbook AFTER (YesYes books, 2015) and the co-creator and writer of the highly anticipated web series “Brown Girls.”

7. Clint Smith

Clint Smith is the author of Counting Descent (2016) and a doctoral candidate at Harvard University who has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. A 2014 National Poetry Slam champion, his writing has been published in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Guardian, Boston Review, Harvard Educational Review and elsewhere.

8. Danez Smith 

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017) and the award winning [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014). Danez is a 2017 NEA Fellow and member of the Dark Noise Collective.

9. Eboni Hogan

Eboni Hogan is a Brooklyn-based poet, playwright, actress and curriculum writer who has performed in over 65 U.S. cities, as well as internationally in Ghana, Germany and Austria. She is the 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion and habitually bougie.

10. Paul Tran

Paul Tran placed Top 10 at the National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam in 2015. They live in Brooklyn, where they serve as Poetry Editor at The Offing and Poet In Residence at Urban Word NYC.

11. Oompa

Oompa is a hood, black, queer slam poet, rapper and Beyoncé aficionado from Boston seeking to make space where the world says there is none for her. She just released her debut album “November 3rd” in 2016 after making final stage with House Slam at the National Poetry Slam in Decatur, Georgia.

12. Joshua Aiken 

Joshua Aiken won the 2016 Martin Starkie Prize for his poem “Disappearing Act(s)” while studying at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and is an alumni of Washington University in St. Louis where he was a proud member of WU-SLam, a spoken word poetry community.

13. Janani Balasubramanian

Janani Balasubramanian is a writer of speculative fiction whose art and editorial work has been featured in The New Yorker, Guernica, Creative Time Reports, The New Inquiry and more. They’ve presented work at 160-plus stages across North America and Europe, including the Public Theater, MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Janani is currently working on “Sleeper” — a dystopian trilogy about sleep, dreams and physics.

14. Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, writer and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a columnist at MTV News and a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was released by Button Poetry in 2016.

15. Safia Elhillo 

Safia Elhillo is a Sudanese-American writer and educator living in Washington, DC. Her debut collection of poetry, The January Children, is available from University of Nebraska Press.

16. Denice Frohman

Denice Frohman is an award-winning poet, writer, performer and educator. She is a 2014 CantoMundo Fellow, 2013 Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, 2013 Hispanic Choice Award winner, and performed at The White House in 2016.

17. Eve L. Ewing 

Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of race and urban education at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, a poet and an essayist. Her debut colleciton of poems, Electric Arches, is forthcoming September 2017 via Haymarket Books.

18. Elizabeth Acevedo

Elizabeth Acevedo is a National Poetry Slam Champion with two collections of poetry, and The Poet X (HarperCollins, 2018) is her debut novel.

19. Jacqui Germain

Jacqui Germain is a poet and freelance writer based in St. Louis, with poems published in Muzzle Magazine and The Offing, and essays published in The New Inquiry and The Establishment. She’s the author of the chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore, published through Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, and is still trying to figure out her own public and private resistance.

20. Jayson P. Smith

Jayson P. Smith is a Brooklyn-based writer, curator, performance artist and current Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow with The Poetry Project.

21. Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times 2016 Top 10 Critics Pick and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award.

22. Nate Marshall

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. He is the author of Wild Hundreds and an editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.

23. Cameron Awkward-Rich

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of Sympathetic Little Monster (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Transit (Button Poetry, 2015). A Cave Canem fellow and poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine, his poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Narrative, The Baffler, Indiana Review and elsewhere

24. Ariana Brown

Ariana Brown is an Afromexicana poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a B.A. in African diaspora studies and Mexican-American studies. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a 2014 national collegiate poetry slam champion, and is currently working on her first manuscript.

25. Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes is the author of City of Bones: A Testament (TriQuarterly, 2017). Dawes notes that his title is for an era that spans 2008–2020.

26. Nabila Lovelace

Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens native; her people hail from Trinidad and Nigeria. Sons of Achilles, her debut book of poems, is forthcoming from YesYes Books.

27. Aja Monet

The revolution will be livestreamed on facebook and instagrammed by your favorite thot, triggered on twitter, so uber cool not to uber, the only bloodshed will be freebleeding or my pussy is borderless, you mean to tell me they dont have starbucks on this march? i wish a mothafucka would, dear 1968, you aint aged one bit, nothin new under the sun, the more things change the more they stay the same, this revolving door, my president is a puppet, white house of horrors, when the pedophile priests bless america, or the crooked babalao, voodoo these divided states, birth of no nation, if you know what’s good for you, kill capitalism, get free or die tryin, rosie the riveter ushers in new law and order, black magic will not be photoshopped, liberate these psychic streets.

Aja Monet is a Caribbean-American blues poet.

28. Porsha Olayiwola

: porsha o is joy in dystopia
: ready to die, again
: how to out breathe the ghost inhaling all around you
: watch me dance on the grave of everything that tried to kill me
: why is the blood so shiny ― so pretty splattered
: the black dyke avoids being devoured, again
: how attendance at therapy appointments and guided meditations heal humans
: how i got whole
: we do not run, here
: here, i am the riot
: watch me burn this place to ash

Porsha Olayiwola is the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam Champion, the 2015 National Poetry Slam Champion, and the co­-founder of House Slam. She identifies as a black, lesbian poet, a hip-­hop feminist, an educator and a organizer.

29. Patricia Smith 

You, so blatantly golden, the helm of every keening ship, so our plummet and our mirrors, so the steel-eye and bellow, you, ass perpetually clenched, sinking in your suit jacket, so our blunder and kismet, the tips of your dwarfish fingers bled raw with currency, you, relentlessly training your teeth, spit-glued crown defying every wind, you are the back-bended sniffler lost in the shadowed end of the school yard, you, legless savior, nailed to the same cross you carry.

Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, performance artist and author. Smith is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the Sierra Nevada College MFA program, recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a National Book Award finalist and the author of eight critically acknowledged volumes of poetry, including her most recent, Incendiary Art.

30. Julian Randall 

By this I mean less sexually (though if that’s your thing by all means get down with yourself) than there is nothing better suited to me to talk about survival than the idea of Morning. I’ve thought nearly every day of this new year about a casually brilliant quote from Natalie Diaz “What happens after the unimaginable? The morning after, and the one after that.” 2016 was almost across the board a year in which we faced so many events that we could only describe as being “the unimaginable”; I cite that every single time somebody mentions Prince dying I feel it all over again as if for the first time because my brain starkly refuses to hold onto the fact that he’s gone.

And yet, in the face of so many apocalypses (here I mean the tertiary definition of apocalypse, brought to my attention by the genius Junot Diaz, meaning “revelation” because I will not give this year or any other the dignity of being my presumed end) we are still here. Wounded, but here. Oppressed, but here. Grieving, but here. Fighting, and ain’t one of the criteria for fighting to be “here”, present, alive? And how truly awe worthy, fight worthy is that? Alive, after all this time. That’s as constant as dawn, whether the clouds ensnare the senses or not somewhere behind all that, the sun, daybreak. That to me is the Morning After it becomes “morning in America.”

As unimaginable tragedy and hurt settles into reality that we (here I am speaking specifically to marginalized folks, especially my own communities as a Queer Black & Afro-Dominican person) are in so many ways also “the unimaginable.” How many generations of survival and endurance and an irreducible desire to live have brought us this far? Does that not make us something unimaginable? Does that not give us the power to bring a morning too?

Julian Randall is a living queer black poet from Chicago pursuing his MFA at Ole Miss. He can be followed on Instagram and Twitter @JulianthePoet.

31. Aziza Barnes 

retitiling 2017
A logic:
cop is to take &
pig is a cop &
Jimmy is a Johnson &
Johnson is a dick &
Dick is a Richard &
Chip is a Frank &
Frank is honest &
Also a suggestion &
Dick is a suggestion &
Short for a fuller name &
Coarse is a word for hair &
Hair is dead & growing &
Dead is brown often on plants &
Green is money unless it’s young &
Guap is bread is cheese is where we put pesticides &
A pest is a hairy pussy & pussy
Is a pet or a chore or a slave &
A slave is brown so is dead so is hair so is also growing & Dick or
Short for the fuller name is a weapon or
An honest suggestion or
Something to cop or
Something to pig & pig is often an element of a verb “to pig” often it is a direction “out” which is
to eat a lot of unnecessarily & a jimmy is also a way to loosen what been locked also a verb “to
jimmy” which is also something to cop but short for the name theft which is to eat too much &
coarse
Is the opposite of fine which is
Handsome &
Too thin for light &
Unable to braid & also just
Okay & okay is how Andrew Jackson signed his checks which is also how Richard Blaine
signed his checks in Casablanca OKAY which is a movie about a Dick that Jimmy’d a fine slave
or a Richard that Johnson’d a nation for some young or a man that stole a woman for $10,000
francs & called it a name that didn’t relate or a shared name with a commander to genocide of
Native Americans & of which I am one & if OKAY wasn’t OKAY’D there would be more of me &
dick had a black piano player
Or dick had a suggestion for a dead music which is Latin song &
Rome is where Latin was & the aqueduct
Was a system of moving dirt from water from the people or a system of a pest to eat versus a
pest to drown which is what happened to many coarse bodies or women bodies or slave bodies
in certain lakes in the Americas where Richard Blane is from & saved by throwing a fine green
on a plane for his coarse green love or his hair grown dead or his OKAY gone OKAY or his
unable to braid suggestion of a cop which is also a pig which can be a pet if it behaves well.

Aziza Barnes is blk and alive. Winner of the 2015 Pamet River Prize, Aziza’s first full length collection i be but i ain’t is from YesYes Books 2016. They are a Cave Canem Fellow, co-founder of The Conversation Literary Festival and co-host of the podcast “The Poetry Gods.”

32. Dominique Christina

The year is no poem.
It won’t be called anything
With light inside it.
It snatches milk from
The mouths of infants
A lion devouring shrines and sunlight. 

2017 is a weapon.

A low groan in the dark,
A woman in the basement
With a wire hangar and a baby
No bigger than a mustard seed
That she will meet as an ooze in her palms
2017 is the lynch mob discography:
Girl bodies
Gay bodies
Trans bodies
Black bodies
Poor bodies
Nobodies
All strung up like
Mardi Gras beads on Main Street
The stench doesn’t stop the parade 

That’s America.

2017 is a funeral procession.
A lunatic’s marching orders
Conversion therapy
Celebrity Apprentice on
A terrible loop, 

2017 is no poem.

It’s the bastard child of
Interred bones in the Tallahatchie River
A severed spine in Baltimore
A boy’s brain on the street in Ferguson
The last breath of a man in New York
Traffic stops that crescendoed to murder
2017 is a dustbin
Stacked with protest signs and court orders
The lickety split shudder
Of a nation that ran into its ghosts
And only the women were
Acquainted with being haunted.
Empty cupboard soliloquy queens
Snatching their children
From public schools and
Handing them switchblades

                Mommy is sorry.

                This is what the teacher won’t show you.

                Take it.

                These bastards need mortality.

 2017 is the state house glittered now in menstrual blood.

Girl children baying at the dawn limp moon
Oak trees decorated with brassieres
Nazis with their teeth knocked out
A linguistic resistance
With no room for words like “alt right”
When “white supremacy” is story enough. 

2017 is no poem.

It’s a pipeline trying
To breech an ocean,
A woman in a wheelchair
At a protest rally,
A tear gas canister on the steps of the Capitol.

2017 didn’t bring my God with it.

Just hexes and hurricane winds
A democracy doomed by
The wrong weather wreckage of
Rich men and their crucifixion fetish
We gon all carry a cross
You better believe it
Let whatever happens be biblical then.
Let the locusts come if they must.

America is a murdered woman
Ghosting the world
With her cracked levees,
Her burned out mosque,
Her shot up church,
Her impossible promise
Her unmarked graves,
And I am dumb with calling her name.
Despite the yelps of history,
My wobbly faith splits heaven wide open
Reimagines God as mammy,
Starch white apron and a shotgun,
Babies suckling at her unremarkable breasts
Pushing scripture out from the rubble
Saying the battle is finally over and me,
War-walloped and heaving,
Rummaging through debris looking for
Something that glitters...

Oh America,
(If that is your real name)
Take these bones and perform
One last miracle
Take these hands and give me
Back my mouth
Take this mouth and give me back my feet
Take these feet and give me back my courage
Dazzle this uncaptured girl that I might
Live long enough to tell my grandchildren
About the year I stopped beseeching God and
In the trench grew my own temple.
God of the in-between,
God of the firing pin,
God of the slaughtered lamb,
God of a risen god,
Unspell me, here.

I am singing you the hymn of my skirt.
I am burning yellow dahlias on my
One good altar not splintered by shrapnel
Or singed with smoke...
If there is any prayer left
In this world let it be
What is left of our hearts,
Our coliseum hearts,
And the stupid hope that
Regulates the metronome
Of our blood machinery.
The orchestral thrumming,
The insistent rumble,
Of our broken, impossible hearts,
The only evidence I’e ever had
That mountains can be moved.

Dominique Christina is a mother, published author, licensed educator, two-time Women of the World Slam Champion, social agitator, intersectional feminist and cultural Jedi. She is sought after to teach and perform at colleges and universities nationally and internationally every year.

33. Jason Reynolds

IF 2017 WERE A POEM

i’d call it
a flaming bag of shit
left at the front door at
the side door at
the back door
your door
a gathering
double-dutch bucking at
flames the orange
of them plucking at our faces
like immature older brothers
jarring us from sleep
barring us from passage
crackling like broken
voice smelling of familiar
kindling to some
to me at
my door
cotton rope paper
add flint for spark
shoot
shit
no water
no water
this time
this time
i’d call it
this time
us all here
like every time this
prank the prank of
all stupid white boy pranks
gets pulled
figuring between filthying
our feet up or kicking
our feet up and letting
the whole damn house burn down
i’d call it
this time
deciding to sacrifice
name brands
some chapped overworked epidermis
and an epidemic of
supple unbothered soles
eager to know stomp
for once
i’d call it
this time
we’re prepared to explain
the haunting fecal scent to the
houseguests we’d
promised to host
over water
i’d call it
they are coming from far
they will need a place to stay

Jason Reynolds is The New York Times bestselling author of several novels for young people, including Ghost and All-American Boys, which he co-authored with Brendan Kiely. His new novel in verse, Long Way Down, hits stores this fall.

34. Mahogany L. Browne

1.

When they turn bodegas into boutique grocery stores

When they bounce cops up the block

Like this hipster protection program won’t turn back

Lefrak into Harlem turn back Harlem into Chirac

turn back BedStuy into Brownsville turn Brownsville back

Into the Bronx back into Gaza back...

You will taste this strange and bitter American history

Where the Mom and Pop work more hours than the Governor

Where the pesticides overflow our sewer systems

Float our food deserts into neighborhoods

One way in

One way out

Tell me this gentrification be for my own good

Tell me this housing project keep us warfare ready

Tell me Biggie died for our sins

& I’ll show you a Brooklyn stoop with a babies’ name etched in chalk

A hashtag ghost gone already

A price tag on his sisters face

She’s been missing since Sunday

Where choppa lights paint concrete a trail of breadcrumbs

A haunting finding its way back to our homes

1.

The Electoral College is

a lullaby designed to put us

back to sleep.

1.

The ocean is weeping a righteous rage, she got questions for the living:

& what about the sweetheart who would grow to love Tamir Rice? Mike Brown? Korryn Gaines? Akia Gurley?

What about they mamas singing their name before each breakfast?

Or the church praying for their redemption ― bibles raised in the air?

What about their (almost) children? How about they Daddy’s smile?

What about they name make them so easy to turn to ash?

How we ghosting black boys for the toys we gift them?

1.

On a Monday

A white body told my black body

It ain’t earned no apology for the bloodshed

For the nights when my skin grow so cold

I know I must be inches from death

For each death hand delivered to me,

this: silence this: certain dismissal this: post racial reality show this: confederate hug

& don’t it bloom like a mushroom sky?

What about the blues? Why it cry like hail? Why it hell like America so so long

1.

Yo: America

Whatchu know about noose ready

Whatchu know about chalk lines & double barrels

Whatchu know about a murder weapon

Or a loose cigarette

Or a baby sleeping on a couch

Whatchu you know about the flag

The confederate fathers

The truck that followed me down a lonely road in Georgia

The names that I rolled off my tongue in prayer?

Saint Sojourner

Saint Harriet

Saint Rekia

Saint Sandra

Bring me home

Or leave me steady

Gun aimed and cocked ready

Con artists turned 45th resident of the White House

While the 44th President is lifted off the grounds

by his shadow & his Black wife

She sideeye all day

She cheekbone slay

While the media aim and shot at presidential legacy

Until weed smoke & a concert make us remember BLK people ain’t never been human here

Ain’t we beautiful, those that survived the purging

Those that spill, body splay beautiful from a hateful song

This swing sweet sweet low spiritual ain’t neva been inclusive

Whatch know about larynx & baton

How you sing him crow in the key of Emmett Till

What fever fuss you awake?

Who else got cop’d anxiety?

Call it what it is: Post traumatic slave syndrome

Call it land tax until homeless

Call it abortion turned sterilization

Ain’t no lie like the one against our stillborn children

Ain’t no lie like the many that shaped our babies into mute cattle

Prison industrial complex reverberates in the tune of elementary

4th graders are the easiest targets

1.

A Math Problem:

If 1 woman, got a 7 Mac 11

& 2 heaters for the beemer

How many Congress seats will NRA lose?

How many votes will it take for a sexual predator

to lift the White House off her feet?

1.

I am practicing this aim

This tongue a shoestring strafe

My tongue say:

Melt the wires of Guantanamo

Yasin Bey coming home ain’t what we thought it would be

Ain’t no solace in Mecca

Even Spike Lee left Brooklyn

Here, a slumlord will leave my front steps

Full of rat piss & AirBnB my neighbors’ apartment

for half my take home pay

Unhinge the city of Rikers

Bring back the reapers

Give them the loot & the stoop

Yea, they good at killin’ but so was Jefferson.

I mean Washington. I mean CIA. I mean Cointelpro.

I mean they mimic your Grace. I mean it’s a 2017, America.

A new new year & your face lift be botched.

Mahogany L. Browne is author of Redbone (nominated for NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Works) and co-editor of forthcoming anthology The Break Beat Poets: Black Girl Magic. She is an internationally touring poet and Artistic Director of Urban Word NYC, Program Director of BLM@Pratt, Poetry Program Director at the Nuyorican Poets Café.

*All biographies were provided by Tabia Yapp and the participating poets.

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Move along, nothing to see here ― right? Just an elegant lady enjoying a leisurely gondola ride with her elderly female chaperone, a depiction of a proper young woman going about daily life in 16th-century Venice.

But wait, let’s look again:

Oh my! A lifted flap reveals a far more scandalous scene; instead of a chaperone, the lady is accompanied by a dashing gentleman who appears to be feeling her up. 

This erotic interactive flap book, currently on view at the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman building, was illustrated by Donato Bertelli in the late 16th century. The book is part of “Venice in Love,” an exhibition featuring the NYPL’s collections of erotic and romantic artifacts from the Republic of Venice, which existed as an independent state from the 13th to 18th centuries.

In her description of the exhibition, curator Madeleine Viljoen notes that Venice, a relatively liberated secular state, was “famed for its high-end courtesans and low-end prostitutes,” as well as the beauty and elaborate grooming of its women. Throughout its lifetime, the state became “a prime destination for lovers and pleasure seekers,” along with art-lovers ― and the exhibition puts on display the union between Venice’s artistic proclivities and its erotic ones.

As for Bertelli’s peekaboo love scene, why hide the romantic embrace behind another drawing? Viljoen, also the NYPL prints curator, told The Huffington Post in an email that the purpose of the interactive flap book was clearly sexual. “The Venetian flap books,” she said, “were designed with the titillation of the viewer in mind.”

Another flap book leans even more explicitly softcore, allowing readers to enact a pre-photographic version of an upskirt shot:

Viljoen’s description of the exhibition calls attention to the young woman’s “underwear and platform shoes, known as chopines” ― a sexy getup for the time.

These two flap books aren’t just eye-grabbing; they’re highly unusual. “There has been much interest in recent years in so-called interactive prints,” Viljoen told HuffPost. However, “[t]hese were usually didactic and included items like paper astrolabes or anatomical studies ... except for the books shown in the Library’s collection, I cannot think of any other examples of specifically erotic flap books.”

The sensuous images found in the NYPL’s Venetian prints don’t look much like modern day erotica ― in olden days, after all, a glimpse of stocking was looked upon as something shocking ― but boast the same twinkle of subversive playfulness that still titillates frisson-seekers today. “The act of lifting the curtain from the young lovers or of raising the courtesan’s skirt seems quintessentially voyeuristic,” Viljoen told HuffPost.

When it comes to the erotic, some things never change.

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When Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, announced the release of her guitar design collaboration with Ernie Ball manufacturers on Instagram in mid-2015, she described it as “a tool that would be ergonomic, lightweight, and sleek.”

The angular aesthetic of her design is getting an update for 2017, with a new set of colors: Tobacco Burst, Heritage Red, Stealth Black and Polaris White — the latter of which she’s nicknamed “the thin white duke,” the same moniker given to David Bowie.

“Bowie’s like air. People just need Bowie to live,” she told The Huffington Post. Discussing her visual aims for the guitar, Clark continued, “I was going for a kind of retro-future aesthetic. I’m very fond of the Memphis school of design, and I’m fond of angularity in design. So I was going for that, rather than round shapes.”

The guitar features an African mahogany body, with a hand-rubbed rosewood neck and St. Vincent inlays — the two intersecting circles that represent the “S” in her logo. 

She’s seen photos of her Ernie Ball guitar in action. “One of my favorite guitar players — Omar [Rodríguez-López] from The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In — is playing a white one, left-handed. I couldn’t say enough good things about his guitar playing. I’m thrilled that he likes it.”

The instrument, Clark is clear, is an “equal-opportunity guitar,” even if the press latched on to her comment in 2015 that the design left “room for a breast. Or two,” hailing it as a boon for female guitarists. And while the design is lightweight and sleek, there’s no gender attached to it.

“I was making a joke,” she explained. “The guitar is equal-opportunity. It’s a really comfortable guitar no matter your body size or shape, but including if you are small, or if you do have breasts — men have breasts.”

“It’s an incredibly versatile guitar and I designed it with my own experience in mind,” she later added. She explained that the instrument is meant to be versatile, “both tone-wise and ergonomically,” for anyone who picks it up.

She brings up a fair point, on the heels of a press round for her directorial debut in the horror anthology “XX.” Clark said she was asked about the experience of being a woman, specifically, in film — a line of questioning she’s answered ad infinitum as a musician.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in my career side-stepping and unpacking the question of what’s it like to be a woman in music,” Clark said.

Later, she added, “I will say that no one has ever asked a guy in film or [music] what its like to be a guy in [film or] music. I think, personally, I would rather talk about the ins and outs and the specificity of the craft and ideas than spend any more time with this particular question.”

In this case, she’d rather talk about her guitar — and the fact that it’s accessible to a range of musicians.

“I think the idea is to make a great tool for artists and to make a great tool that is friendly to play whether you’re just starting out or whether you’ve been playing for 30 years or more,” Clark said.

And for those just starting out in the music world, Clark has this advice: “I just think it’s really important to know all aspects of your craft ... Find out what you can about engineering, and learn about frequencies, and be able to be the engineer or speak to engineers live and in studio. And just make things that you like. Not things that you think other people might like, but things that you like. And things that matter to you.”

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In her first memoir, Yiyun Li is a scientist-turned-literary-darling writing about depression, so you’d expect her prose to be methodical and her characterization of the disease concrete. But Dear Friend, from My Life, I Write to You in Your Life isn’t as airless as that. It’s not an empirical study of mental illness, but a collection of very personal observations, a story as poetic and wending as its title.

Li was born in Beijing and served in the Chinese military for one year before immigrating to America, an experience that makes its way into the book. Settling in Iowa, she studied immunology before also studying nonfiction and fiction writing. Her interest in science could be familial ― her father was a nuclear physicist ― but her passion for stories is rooted in her childhood, when she read incomplete portions of serialized Victorian novels and whatever she could find at her local library, where she volunteered.

Li writes elliptically about her first forays into fiction, her fraught relationships with her family, her years spent in China, and the aspects of American culture that stood out to her upon immigrating. (The concreteness of “before and after” images in magazines seemed to her like a fairy tale ― aspirational and befuddling.) The stylistic choice is a good one; it matches her experience of depression, which also hit her in fits. It’s reminiscent of Marilynne Robinson’s essays, which proceed as thoughts might, making thematic connections while hopping around in time and space. It’s no wonder, then, that Robinson praised the book as “remarkable.”

In Dear Friend, Li comments directly on her disinterest in overdramatizing her memories and stories. When she was 16, she was on the periphery of the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, an event that her novel Kinder Than Solitude is centered on. On its anniversary, she’s been asked to provide comments, a request that eventually lead her to declare that she’s said all she has to say.

“[W]hat can be said, on a radio program or on TV, is always a simplification or distortion,” she writes. “The desire for an individual’s experience to be connected to something larger comes from both the audience and the actor, and the performance is evaluated by its relevance to the time. One either has to submit oneself to that script, or else choose to only speak on one’s own terms.”

One gets the sense, while reading her memoir, that turning away from tempting, moralizing distillations is Li’s objective in writing. An individual’s complex web of motivations can’t be summed up in a sound bite. 

So, Li doesn’t give us distilled reflections on her life; she gives us her depression, in medias res. She gives us depictions of her mother’s cruelty (and tells us where that cruelty stems from) before she analyzes other writers’ maternal connections. Ivan Turgenev asserted his difference from his mother; Marianne Moore lived with hers until she died, a connection that Li says made Moore’s prose impersonal.

This literary trivia may seem beside the point for some readers, but for Li, literature is what holds her life together ― at times, it’s what’s saved her. So, her celebration of novels, and of stories told with the intention of achieving empathy, is done just right.

The bottom line:

Li’s writing unfolds slowly, like a story shared between good friends. That seems to be the point: She writes to connect with her readers on the deepest emotional level. And she succeeds.

Who wrote it:

Yiyun Li is the author of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, The Vagrants, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, and Kinder Than Solitude. She’s the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, and a PEN/Hemingway Award. Typically a fiction writer, this is her first memoir.

Who will read it?

Anyone interested in memoirs about literature, depression and recovery. Also, anyone broadly interested in reading the work of writers who are immigrants.

What other critics are saying:

Kirkus: “A potent journey of depression that effectively testifies to unbearable pain and the consolation of literature.”

The New York Times: “The reader never doubts that Li is an incisive thinker, but her tendency to sublimate her own emotions in the correspondence between others, be it Turgenev to Henry James or Chekhov to Tchaikovsky, occasionally puts one in mind of a devout nun’s scrupulous study of her prayer book.”

Opening lines:

“My first encounter with before and after was in one of the fashion magazines my friends told me to subscribe to when I came to America.”

Notable paragraph:

“Once in a while I get an email from someone I have met briefly. ‘You may not remember me,’ these emails often begin, the hope to be remembered expressed by the acceptance of having already been forgotten.

Sometimes out of mere mischief I reply with a detailed account of our encounter. People are joyfully surprised when they are remembered, but I have not been honest with them. There is a difference between being remembered and being caught by the mesh of one’s mind.”

Dear Friend, from My Life, I Write to You in Your Life
Yiyun Li
Random House, $27.00
Published Feb. 21

The Bottom Line is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda knows that immigrants get the job done, and that’s why the “Hamilton” creator is hoping to raise money for two organizations that he says “help strengthen the immigrant workforce.”

The 37-year-old star launched a new contest via the prize-based fundraising platform Prizeo this month, raffling a date with his parents to the premiere of “Hamilton” in San Francisco.

“Immigrants: it’s a loaded word today in 2017, but they’re consistently what made our country great,” he said in a video posted by the media site Attn: on Sunday. “Right now, Latinos are in the spotlight, but at every point in our nation’s history ... when immigrants succeed, we all succeed. We do the jobs no one else wants to do.”

As Miranda notes, Latinos make up a large percentage of immigrants in the United States. Around 47 percent of immigrants living in the U.S. in 2015 were Hispanic, according to Pew Research Center data.

Miranda, who is currently filming an upcoming “Mary Poppins” film in London, can’t make it to the opening night of “Hamilton” in San Francisco, so he’s having his parents step in to give the winner of the contest an unforgettable night.

“You’ll be going with my mom and dad — Luz and Luis!” he wrote on the Prizeo site. “They’re the best and they’re going to make sure you have an incredible time.”

The contest offers a winner and a friend round-trip tickets to San Francisco, accommodations, two tickets to the opening night of “Hamilton” and access to the afterparty with the cast. Fans must donate at least $10 on the Prizeo site to enter, and donations will go toward Code2040, an organization nurturing black and Latino talent in tech, and the Latino Community Foundation, which helps Latino-led philanthropic organizations.

The actor and composer has done several Prizeo campaigns in the past, raising funds for Planned Parenthood, the Hispanic Federation and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

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Independent filmmaker Kerstin Karlhuber explores the lingering effects of gay “conversion” therapy in her first full-length feature, “Fair Haven,” and The Huffington Post has an exclusive clip from the film. 

The romantic drama, which hits select theaters Friday, follows James (played by Michael Grant), a young gay man who returns to his family’s New England farm after receiving conversion therapy treatment. At first, James believes he’s been cured of his same-sex attraction, but soon finds myself reconnecting with a former flame, Charlie (Josh Green), as seen in the video above. 

Karlhuber, who is the founder of Silent Giant Productions, told The Huffington Post that she first became interested in exploring conversion therapy after a discussion with screenwriter Jack Bryant. “He had personally seen several friends and family members come back from this devastating ‘therapy’ and wanted to highlight the horrors they endured,” she said. “Once he told me more about this practice, it also became incredibly important to me, not only from a director’s point of view, but as a human being on this planet where young people are being subjected to this trauma.” 

“Fair Haven,” which also stars “The Dukes of Hazzard” icon Tom Wopat, is dedicated to Karlhuber’s transgender cousin, Katelyn, who died shortly after the film was completed. 

“The kind of discrimination she faced in her life is exactly why making this film was so incredibly important to me,” the director, who hails from Vermont, told HuffPost. She also hopes to “continue telling stories that support anyone feeling prejudiced or discriminated against” in her future work, too. “I hope that it opens a few closed minds. If this film inspires someone to look past their own prejudice and find tolerance, then I’ll have achieved my goal,” she said. 

Watch the official trailer for “Fair Haven,” which will be released March 3 in theaters and March 7 on demand, below. 

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When photographer David Tesinsky first heard about Malu, a transgender woman who has achieved somewhat of a celebrity status in her native Cuba, he instantly wanted to meet her. 

Tesinsky, who hails from the Czech Republic, has always highlighted what he describes as “subcultural” groups in his work; he has previously documented homeless Parisians, youth activists in Iran and queer rights advocates in Belarus. He told The Huffington Post that when he finally made it to Cuba in January, he was immediately struck by Malu’s determination to live authentically, in spite of the political and social challenges the Cuban LGBTQ community continues to face.

A performer at a local theater, Malu is one of three subjects that Tesinsky captured for his “Before Night Falls” series. The others, Natasha and Alina, identify as gay men. Still, both challenge gender stereotypes in their own right, making a second living as drag performers in Havana nightclubs. 

“I’m inspired by contrast,” Tesinsky told The Huffington Post. “That somebody could just be selling fruits and vegetables during the day for a living, and then can turn into a queen of the evening on stage at night,” he said. He was struck by what he describes as a lack of a distinctive “community” in the traditional sense as far as queer Cubans are concerned. “They keep it very low profile,” he said. 

Tesinsky, who plans to visit Israel and Mongolia next, hopes his Cuba photographs will shed some light on how LGBTQ people are exploring gender and identity on the stage “in a country where these things haven’t been tolerated” at all until recently. 

Check out “Before Night Falls” below, and view more of Tesinsky’s work here. 

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For more on “The Bachelor,” check out HuffPost’s Here To Make Friends podcast below:  

Do people love “The Bachelor,” “The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise,” or do they love to hate these shows? It’s unclear. But here at “Here to Make Friends,” we both love and love to hate them — and we love to snarkily dissect each episode in vivid detail. Podcast edited by Nick Offenberg.

Want more “Bachelor” stories in your life? Sign up for HuffPost’s Entertainment email for extra hot goss about The Bachelor, his 30 bachelorettes, and the most dramatic rose ceremonies ever. The newsletter will also serve you up some juicy celeb news, hilarious late-night bits, awards coverage and more. Sign up for the newsletter here.

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Alexis Adler had just graduated from Barnard College in New York City with a degree in biology when she fell for a charming artist four years her junior. His name was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The two moved in together later that year, into a sixth-floor walk-up with about 400 square feet of living space located on East 12th Street in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood. The rent, wildly, was $80 a month, affordable enough for Basquiat to support himself by selling sweatshirts on the street. The couple spent about a year in the apartment, a passionate and creatively fertile time that Adler chronicled meticulously with her camera.

A selection of Adler’s photographs from the East 12th Street days are now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado, in an exhibition titled “Basquiat Before Basquiat.” The show also features early works Basquiat made during this time, along with objects culled from their shared apartment. Yet the standout works on view are the casual and intimate snapshots of young Basquiat, not yet one of the most famous artists of his time, just a young man who made art out of everything he saw, felt and touched.

At age 19, Basquiat was still waffling between performance art, music, drawing and writing, and had yet to solidify the abstract-graffiti aesthetic that would become his signature. “Jean was just a young and wonderful person that had a lot to say,” Adler told Christie’s in 2014. “Everything around us was about art at that time, everything was about creativity, and whatever he could find became art.”

Adler’s photographs document Basquiat’s early experimentations, elements of which predict his later, iconic works. In one photo, Basquiat practices clarinet in the bathroom, rehearsing for his art-noise band while straddling the bathtub. In another, Basquiat has his head shaved to the middle of his scalp. When he directed Adler to take the photos, she told The New York Times, he instructed her to make it appear as though he was “coming and going at the same time.”

Clearly, Basquiat wasn’t a typical roommate. “We were punk pioneers homesteading in this ever-evolving remnant of the neighborhood,” Adler writes in MCA Denver’s exhibition catalog. “Art blossomed by feeding off the lawless decay.” While Adler spent her days working at a lab at Rockefeller University, Basquiat got to work making his every wall, floor and personal belonging his canvas. He would borrow Adler’s textbooks and mine them for interesting scientific diagrams and medical jargon that he’d incorporate into his imagery. 

During this time, Adler recalls, Basquiat knew he was going to become a great artist. But it’s hard to imagine he could have predicted just how quickly he would rise to art superstardom, or the astronomical impact he would leave on the history of art before his death at age 27.

Adler’s photographs capture Basquiat just before he “made it” as an artist, when he was still incessantly, ravenously, ardently making art. 

“Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979 – 1980” runs until May 7 at MCA Denver.

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Donald Trump’s presidency has fueled a surge of new activists, eager to defend the rights of immigrants, Muslims, women, children, LGBTQ individuals and all who feel threatened by the current administration. Protests have sprung up in cities across the nation since his inauguration, demonstrating that power exists not just in the White House but on the streets.

Images of marches, rallies and demonstrations of all kinds are, today, relentlessly documented and shared on social media, endowing ephemeral happenings with permanent, material form. Yet long before the internet, protests were still part of the fabric of American democracy, and devoted photojournalists ensured that activist uprisings were not easily forgotten. The main difference, however, is that most of these pre-internet photos remain largely unseen. 

An exhibition titled “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” on view at the Bronx Documentary Center honors the legacy of protest photography in New York, zooming in on the years between 1980 and 2000. The show, featuring the work of 37 independent photojournalists, is co-curated by Meg Handler, former photo editor of The Village Voice; historian Tamar Carroll, author of Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty and Feminist Activism; and Michael Kamber, founder of the Bronx Documentary Center (BDC).

The exhibition picks up in 1980, when New Yorkers were grappling with economic upheaval, shifting demographics, the AIDS crisis, the culture wars, environmental unease, and the ongoing struggle for equal rights. Many of the issues precipitating these images ― from police brutality to gentrification to a woman’s right to choose ― are still being fought out in the streets today. 

“Whose Streets?” features snapshots from a variety of moments, causes and perspectives. The photograph above, for example, shot by Ricky Flores in Brooklyn in 1990, depicts a crowd of predominantly white men deriding a black protest. The demonstration occurred after Bensonhurst resident Keith Mondello, a white man, was acquitted of murder after shooting 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins, who was black.

Hawkins had gone to the mostly Italian Brooklyn neighborhood to look at a used car, and was attacked and shot to death by a mob of eight white men. Although Mondello was considered the ringleader of the group, he did not fire the fatal shot, and thus was convicted only on lesser counts. Black protesters took to the streets in defiance of the verdict, and the photo depicts white Bensonhurst residents mocking the demonstrators, with one man holding a watermelon above his head. 

Nina Berman’s 1989 photo above depicts pro-choice protestors as they stormed the Brooklyn Bridge on July 3, 1989. The march occurred just after the Supreme Court ruled to “uphold a Missouri state ban on the use of public employees and facilities for performing abortions,” reversing elements of Roe v. Wade. Police arrested 24 pro-choice advocates that day, including activist Mary Lou Greenberg, marking a crucial moment in the battle for reproductive rights.

Certain elements of the featured photos distinguish them from the more contemporary crop scattered across various social media feeds and timelines. The style of police uniforms, outdated haircuts, the overwhelming lack of smartphones being brandished in the air. Yet, for the most part, these scenes could just as well be taking place today, when the majority of social injustices plaguing our country are just as prevalent as they were over 30 years ago. 

For the many people today still learning how to incorporate acts of resistance into their daily lives, head to the Bronx Documentary Center to see how people have been showing up and speaking out for decades. The photographs depict anger, resolution, hope and solidarity, written on the faces and bodies of countless individuals whose names often go unrecognized. The images, however, will ensure they’re not forgotten. 

“Whose Streets? Our Streets! New York City: 1980–2000” is on view at the Bronx Documentary Center until March 5, 2017.

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