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Apogee Issue 06

23 Nov 2015
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    We are pleased to announce the release of Apogee Issue 06! This gorgeous cover features artist Xaviera Simmons. Check out all the exciting artists and writers below. Join us in celebrating the launch of Issue 06 on Thursday, December 10, 2015, at 7:00pm, at the Bureau of General Services Queer Division (208 W 13th St #210, New York, NY 10011). The evening will feature readings from Issue 06 contributors Victoria Brown, Nina Puro, Chase Berggrun, Soyini Ayanna Forde, Leila Ortiz, Derrick Austin, and Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. $5 Suggested donation. Looking forward to seeing you! xoxo Apogee   Poetry Walter Ancarrow Derrick Austin Chase Berggrun Cathy Linh Che Soyini Ayanna Forde Tyler Kline Karen An-Hwei Lee Michelle Lin Leila Ortiz Nina Puro Jennifer Tamayo   Nonfiction Victoria Brown Chido Muchemwa Jerald Walker Tinghui Zhang   Fiction Kiik A. K. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Gemini Wahhaj Norman Zelaya   Visual Artists Lizzie Gill Kapwani Kiwanga Christian Newby Imran Perretta Kaitlin Pomerantz Stina Puotinen Xaviera Simmons Stacey Tyrell Clemence Vazard

BOOK REVIEW: Margo Jefferson's 'Negroland: A Memoir,' by Elisabeth Sherman

09 Nov 2015
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  Margo Jefferson’s Negroland: A Memoir  Elisabeth Sherman   Literature is experiencing a renaissance in the memoir genre. Women especially dominate this field. But critic Margo Jefferson has created a staggering hybrid work in Negroland, combining historical research with autobiography with lyric essay to elevate memoir beyond the confines of internal thought processes and solipsistic reflections on an individual experience. Jefferson opens Negroland with a history of America’s post-slavery landscape in brief profiles and letters of this country’s first black elite: James Forten, “abolitionist and entrepreneur,” Cyprian Clamorgan, author of The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, and Charlotte Forten, teacher and activist. This opening serves as the first hint that Jefferson’s book will be an act of preservation, a new historical record of “colored society.” Historical context becomes crucial when the narrative turns to Jefferson’s life. Her memoir transcends the current popular modes of first person writing. It’s not a diary, chronicling the minutiae of an author’s life, nor is it personal essay pegged on a current event. Playing with a sly academic tone, Negroland is reminiscent of a brilliant college lecture, during which the professor occasionally interrupts herself with personal anecdotes. Jefferson interweaves her personal story with that of her cultural...
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Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Losing My Father by Ola Osaze

03 Nov 2015
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  Losing my father Ola Osaze   I crossed the threshold of the American border on a sunny Fall day in 1991, not too long after yet another military-backed coup rocked Nigeria. The riots and subsequent government-sanctioned reprisals meant more school closures, curfews, harassment, and abuse at the hands of police for indeterminate lengths of time. It also meant more killings. As we walked through the tarmac of the Greensboro, North Carolina airport, my mother clutched my 15-year-old sweaty hand in her cold dry one. Approaching the queue for customs where we would declare our possessions for inspection, a prominent sign on display caught our attention. The bright green and white colors of my country’s flag read, “Beware of Nigerian Drug Smugglers.” And just like that, we were placed crudely into the reality of racism in America. Many of us leave our African homes with our hearts brimming with optimism and our heads filled with delusions about what these American places will make possible. What we find instead, as Africans in America, are deep struggles for economic survival in the midst of an ever-evolving and complicated sense of racial and ethnic identity. For queer and transgender Africans living in the...
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Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Take, Eat by RJ Eldridge

14 Oct 2015
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  Take, Eat RJ Eldridge   The Corrector in my mind tells me Just be straightforward. Tell about how the big things we don’t earn make the little things distant. Lately, I can’t feel what my words gesture to. Lately, I don’t know what’s real. I’m supposed to look at what’s right in front of me. Stand before my own reflection and say I am. What does it matter what I say I am? Say I’m a writer. Say I’m an artist. Say I’m a black, a man. Say I’m a mouse, a dog. I don’t know if I want to be human. If human is enough. I dream. I go to sleep and the images come. Same as all men, and all mice. I am nothing new. What’s new, or at least what seems new, is the gap between me and my self. Between what light does with a form I call mine, and my body’s pure vernacular. Between the me I am, and the me I believed I’d be. I’m in a dark that feels cold to my skin. I’m supposed to be here. I suppose I am here. I may be another, in another place. You want...
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Nonfiction

NONFICTION: What I Want to Say by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

12 Oct 2015
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  What I Want to Say Nancy Jooyoun Kim   I call my mother twice a week. Now that she’s retired—no longer hanging women’s clothes in the small swapmeet shop she owned for over 20 years—I worry that maybe she’s lonely. I live in Seattle, and she’s in Los Angeles. Maybe she’s sitting in her house waiting for my sister and I to come home, as if we were children who had just gone off to school one morning—our backpacks full of notepads and stickers and sandwiches—and never came back. When I worry about her, the worst of my imagination takes over. I see her dying in the driver’s seat of a half blown-up car, Universal-Studios style, with an animatronic Godzilla hovering overhead, breathing fire mechanically out of its great mouth.   I see her as the child in the red coat in Schindler’s List. Or, like in those commercials that make you think of the elderly as completely vulnerable, utterly broken (opinionless) birds, I see her fallen—and she can’t get up. Basically, I call her because I want to know that she is not dead. It’s a tremendous feeling really. That fear. You don’t actually want to talk to...
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Poetry

The Fujianese are Badasses: an interview with Wo Chan

23 Sep 2015
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  Apogee Benefit Preview #2   This week we’re posting interviews and previews for our annual benefit on Friday September 25th. Today’s interview features queer Fujianese poet and drag performer Wo Chan, one of our four benefit readers.     The Fujianese are badasses: an interview with Wo Chan by Melody Nixon   Melody Nixon (MN): Your poetry investigates and challenges prescribed notions of identity through the personal and intimate. In the 2010s, decades after the slogan was first used by feminists, is the personal still political? What power lies in the intimate?    Wo Chan (WC): Absolutely. Confession: I’ve never voted in my life. This is mostly due to timing—I was too young to vote when I was a U.S. citizen, and by the time I was old enough, I had lost my citizenship. Does this mean my life is not political? I think being a Chinese immigrant is inherently political if you look at the foundational role that Chinese Americans had in catalyzing U.S. immigration policy—namely, exclusion. To be a queer person of color fighting deportation is a burden of multiple politics that I was never ready to navigate. It’s also deeply personal, because at the core of...
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Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams, Sophia E. Terazawa

22 Sep 2015
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  Psychosis and Black-Eyed Dreams Sophia E. Terazawa   A stain on the right lens of my glasses looks like Princess Kaguya of the moon floating in the iris. I take them off. Someone must have put her there, I think. My father had shown me a photograph of her once. She used to be a parachute in the sky. Pale. A dandelion seed in her own night.   “Is she watching over me now, papa?”   “Yes,” he says. And I become happy.   When my father finds me in front of the television at two in the morning, he slaps me so hard that the glasses fly off my face.   Loud questions in male voices scare me: “What are you doing, huh? Why are you looking at me like that? What is your PROBLEM?!”   The illness angers my father. He does not know why I watch television at two in the morning. I stare him down. No explanation. No answer.   He slaps me so hard that it sends me into lunar orbit.   “Papa, can you tell the story again? The one about the lonely princess?” “Yes,” he says. And I adore him whole. Whole....
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Uncategorized

Reason to Give #6: Writing in the Margins

21 Sep 2015
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  Our 6th reason to give: we want to reclaim the margins, and we are committed to help others do so with words. Check out our Writing in the Margins Workshops.      There are too few spaces that allow writers and artists to grapple with their complex social and political identities, and use that interrogation to expand the scope and relevance of literature. This was the aim of Writing in the Margins, our 8-week writing and critical discussion group in Brooklyn. We demand relevant literature! We are working to create it, are you?   Read some of the incredible writing by the workshop participants on Perigee:   I remember the immediate bond we felt as young widows whose husbands had been taken from us by the AIDS epidemic. Mari’s husband Reinaldo had returned from the war in Angola in 1985, around the same time that my husband Clarence had finally kicked a 13 year heroin habit that started when he served in Vietnam. Different wars, different countries…two women unknowingly at risk. Every time I visited with Mari I had the same unspoken thought––why her, why not me? I was painfully aware of the different route the virus had taken through each...
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Tibetan Resilience: an interview with Jamyang Norbu

21 Sep 2015
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  Apogee Benefit Preview #1   This week we’re posting interviews and previews for our annual benefit on Friday September 25th. Today’s interview features Tibetan writer and intellectual, Jamyang Norbu, one of our four benefit readers.   Tibetan resilience: an interview with Jamyang Norbu by Tenzin Dickie   I talked to Tibetan writer and intellectual Jamyang Norbu, who lives in Tennessee, on Skype the other night. His Skype handle includes the numbers 59, referring to the year the Chinese army consolidated its occupation of Tibet, an event that radically changed the trajectory of JN’s life. As a teenager growing up in the Indian border town of Darjeeling where a substantial Tibetan refugee community had resettled, JN dropped out of school to join the Tibetan resistance forces based in the Himalayan kingdom of Mustang in Nepal. Still in his late teens, he taught the Khampa guerillas Nepali and military history. The CIA had been covertly supporting the Tibetan resistance but when they began pulling out, the Tibetan government sent JN to Paris. He was successful in his mission and French intelligence supported the guerillas for two more years. Coming back to Dharamsala, the Tibetan capital of exile in northern India, as...
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Reason to Give #5: We praxis what we preach

18 Sep 2015
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  Our fifth Reason to Give is simple: We praxis what we preach   Apogee staff is committed to the power of merging literature and social justice, not only in our journal but also in classrooms, writing groups, and community centers. Thanks to NY Writer’s Coalition and the amazing students at Benjamin Banneker Academy, Apogee editors worked side by side with the after school writing program to produce the first ever edition of GUMBO: Great United Minds Believing in Ourselves.   Over the course of a semester, editors met weekly with youth to discuss creative writing, revision and editing. We cultivated individual mentorships, fostered leadership and group accountability. Most importantly, we all had the most fun ever doing it.   By supporting Apogee, you support not only our publication but also our project to grow literature and social justice in our communities. Make a tax-deductible donation through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas.  
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