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The title of the second collection of poetry by Lambda Award-winning poet and performer Rosamond S. King, All The Rage (published April 2021) has multiple valences: Conveying at once righteous anger towards this country's continued oppression of Black people and the racial coding of rage, it also hints at the usurpation of the movement for Black liberation by corporations, businesses, and influencers. This is a book which urges us not to allow the intensity of public outcry against anti-Black police violence that occurred in Summer 2020 to become merely a moment in history in which Black liberation was "trendy,"…

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Happy Birthday to Akilah Oliver! Akilah Oliver (1961-2011) is remembered for her fiercely intelligent and ambitious writing, which sought to do no less than expand the boundaries of an African-American literary dialogic tradition in its troubling of "Blackness," "femaleness," and "homogeneity." She was a mother, a queer woman, and a true renaissance woman, who co-founded the feminist performance collective the Sacred Naked Nature Girls, worked with the Los Angeles Poverty Department (a theater troupe which worked with the homeless), and was a member of Belladonna* Collaborative, a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School, and a professor at Naropa University and…

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Nightboat Books initiated a new fellowship program in 2020 and was fortunate enough to have two incredible individuals in the position: Jaye Elizabeth Elijah (Spring-Summer) and Santiago Valencia (Fall). They made incredible contributions to the press during their tenure. Jaye, while a fellow and then our publicity coordinator, curated the Resonance: Echo series in response to the start of the pandemic, hosted the summer fiction reading, and did invaluable publicity work and outreach. Santi commissioned new contributors to our blog and brought their keen eye and wit to writing and editing projects. Here, Jaye and Santi look back on…

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