Rafia Zafar guest edits African American Review’s special issue on Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
This special issue of African American Review remembers, recharges, and reimagines the legacy of Afro-Borinqueño visionary Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
We are a community of readers and writers, scholars and teachers. We range across the literatures of English in space as well as time, combining global diversity with broad historical coverage. This resource opens for you as students under the guidance of faculty who are committed to their roles as teachers and mentors. In our department, you will feel at once welcomed and challenged—starting with the openness of our faculty, staff, and students and stretching to the novel encounters with language your peers and instructors will help to spark.
English is one of the most storied departments in the College of Arts & Sciences. Our recent history includes two U.S. Poet Laureates and multiple National Book Award winners as well as noted scholars in many fields of literary history. Our accomplishments as a faculty become an invitation, for you as students, to reach the level of excellence you expect of yourselves, whether in the form of a national award or an essay or poem well written. We have been recognized as exceptional in this respect: USA Today has ranked us as the sixth-best home in the nation for undergraduate authors, while College Magazine has placed us at number eight. Such recognition testifies to the tradition of collaboration in our department, where we share the experience of literature’s power to enlighten, inspire, challenge, and lead.
The first issue of The Spectacle was launched in the fall of 2015, with Kelly Caldwell, Cassie Donish, and Jonathan McGregor at the helm. Twice a year, the magazine publishes issues that include poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art, while THE REVUE publishes flash prose, short poems, interviews, special features, and other pieces year-round.
We aim for content that reminds us that our lenses matter—they focus, distort, clarify, conceal. We value and emphasize relationships between the literary and visual arts, pairing the majority of the pieces we publish with original work from a variety of contributing visual artists.
Based in the English, Creative Writing, and Visual Art programs at Washington University in St. Louis, The Spectacle is committed to publishing work from under-represented voices, including people of color, women, people from LGBTQIA+ communities, and people who have disabilities.
Read our Current Issue“To unpack and enjoy complex texts; to read with a critical eye; to write and communicate with concision and purpose -- these are skills invaluable to my pursuit of the law, my pursuit of meaning, and without them I would be lost.”
―Ryan Foreman BA, 2014This special issue of African American Review remembers, recharges, and reimagines the legacy of Afro-Borinqueño visionary Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
Kathryn Davis runs an innovative workshop that allows graduate students the space and time to write novels.