Perigee

As editors and writers who value marginalized voices, we at Apogee continually re-examine the role of institutions in facilitating dialogue and ensuring representation. The yearly AWP conference is one such institution, which both fosters a dynamic and rich literary community, while at times drawing criticism for alienating marginalized writers. Our presence at this year’s AWP conference represents an attempt to negotiate this tension. Through collaboration with other organizations with track records of elevating underrepresented voices, we hope to contribute to important conversations about how intersections of race, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, citizenship status, and other facets of identity shape writers’ and editors’ interactions with literary institutions. We hope to help shape these discussions with a framework of radical inclusivity. We want to encourage writers and literary professionals to use AWP as a whole as a platform for furthering this project. If you’d like to join this conversation virtually, please connect with us on Twitter, using the hashtag #inclusiveAWP. We invite you to join Apogee founders Melody Nixon and Zinzi Clemmons as well as Apogee advisory board member Rachel Eliza Griffiths at their respective panels. From the Margins: Literary Magazines Supporting Writers of Color (Jyothi Natarajan, Ron Kavanaugh, Melody...

Interviews

Thoraya El-Rayyes in conversation with debut novelist Saleem Haddad

Apogee Journal

24 Mar 2016

Saleem Haddad’s recently published debut novel, Guapa, is the story of a twenty-something-year-old gay man named Rasa living in an unidentified Arab country, trying to carve out a life for himself in the midst of political and religious upheaval. The novel is set over the course of twenty-four hours, on the day that Rasa’s grandmother, the woman who raised him, catches him in bed with his lover, Taymour. Here, literary translator Thoraya El-Rayyes talks to Saleem about Arab sexuality under the Western gaze, chain smoking grandmothers, and writing a novel in the midst of the Arab Spring. Thoraya: A few weeks ago, I had the misfortune to come across an article in The New York Times with the headline The Sexual Misery of the Arab World by an Algerian writer, Kamel Daoud. He wanted to inform the Generic American Liberal (or whoever it is that reads the NYT) that “sex determines everything that is unspoken” in the Arab world. Everything. The article even came with the obligatory illustration of a veiled woman with her eyes cast downwards – you know, just calling out for the white reader to save her. Sometimes, it seems like you can write any old shit...

Poetry

Two Poems by Kristin Chang

Apogee Journal

08 Mar 2016

my obituary is available for pre-order Kristin Chang im driving around with you, white boy in a honda suv my ancestors all piled in the backseat, a stack of ghosts like bruised-back playing cards we stop at a 7/11 and i buy infant cough syrup while your tongue plays my teeth. i can see the veins mapping your eyelids into hostile territory, your wrist gripped in my throat. you call me your best ghost and i dream about selling my dead dog on craigslist. with my face slotted into yours i dream about spreading my mother’s ashes into a feast honey im home and i died to get here confession: i like the smell of my own shit confession: i really like to cook confession: i deboned a whole frozen chicken with my teeth a kind of hunger the shade of wolf. i survived two wars you’ve livetweeted my hunger is a throat opening on the back of my left hand. it feeds on snow the color of meat, it feeds on operas about white soldiers and brown women i guess you and i would look great in a painting or a YahooNews headline im already wearing a...

Publish, Perish, Other: A Talk-Back (Part 1)

Apogee Journal

29 Feb 2016

Publish, Perish, Other: A Talk-Back (Part 1) Apogee Journal Poetry Co-Editors Joey De Jesus and Muriel Leung chat about their anxieties stepping into the editor role, their thoughts on the state of literary publishing, aesthetic, subjectivity, brujeria, hybridity, and dead things. They pop off. (you’re welcome). Muriel: Joey, I’m interested to know how you came to work for Apogee Journal? What informs your commitment to this literary space from its founding until now? Also, of all the literary joints in this town… what brought you to poetry editorial work? What goals do you have for the larger literary community as well as your own creative work through editing poetry? Joey: The story of how I came to work for Apogee is maybe kind of boring. The fun part is that the marvelous editors of No, Dear Magazine invited me to participate in a reading they’d put together at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and I was like, absolutely. My mother had been complaining that I never invite her to readings. So I was like, come to this one mom! I mean, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe means something in my home. I figured it’d be perfect. It was also a good...

Poetry

Not Easy to Love but Necessary: A collaboration between Winter Tangerine and Apogee Journal

Apogee Journal

25 Feb 2016

Join us at the Poets House on Friday night to enjoy readings from Winter Tangerine and Apogee Journal. Readers include Shira Erlichman, Giana Angelillo, Thiahera Nurse, Gala Mukomolova, Camonghne Felix, Jayson Smith, Laura Hartenberger, and Diamond Sharp. As Camonghne Felix, an Apogee contributor, will be reading at the Poet’s House, we’d like to celebrate her poetry by sharing her poem, “Beer Pong” (Apogee Issue 05). Join us. February 26 // 5 PM // Poets House 10 River Terrace //NYC

Uncategorized

Throwback to Issue 03

Apogee Journal

18 Feb 2016

Apogee Journal has come a long way since its founding in 2010. We have our talented, celestial contributors, our dedicated staff, and our indispensable readers to thank for our latest issue, Issue 06, as well as our past issues. In gratitude, we want to throw it back to Issue 03, in which Morgan Parker, Mahogany L. Browne, Chinelo Okparanta, Christopher Soto, David Mura, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and the late José Esteban Muñoz, gave us something to think about, something that keeps thinking still. For this week only, buy Issue 06 and we’ll gift you Issue 03, free.

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Cradling the Cat, Bernard Grant

Apogee Journal

08 Feb 2016

Cradling the Cat Bernard Grant In pictures, Marissa is a mass of black fur, no face. Only her eyes appear, big and yellow, though at night her pupils expand and her eyes resemble big black buttons. According to the paper that was taped to her cage, she’s a medium-haired domestic. I’m no expert, but I see her as long-haired, especially when she stands beside the short-haired tabby that lives here, my roommate’s cat, an attention-seeker. Marissa is shy, though not quiet. She squeaks and coos like a baby. She’s a year and a month old, a teenager in cat years. True to teenage nature she finds ways to complicate her caretaker’s life. She sits on my books while I’m reading them, wakes me at odd hours, pawing and meowing, and decides my bed is best to explore while I’ll making it in the mornings. She climbs into crevices—to what end, I’m unsure—and onto bookshelves, knocking pens, paperclips, and other small items to the floor, frightening herself. Sudden sounds and movements send her dashing into the closet. She’s new to this house. I am, too. When my sudden illness—an atrophied cerebellum, ataxia—illuminated the difficulties I was having with my...

Interviews

Interview with Apogee Journal’s New Staff: Safia Jama

Apogee Journal

04 Feb 2016

We are so thrilled to welcome Safia Jama to Apogee Journal’s editorial team as our newest Nonfiction Editor! See what she has to say about finding community, seeing herself in the work of writers and artists of color, and what it means to love “work that doesn’t care to be likeable.” Apogee Journal [AJ]: Welcome to Apogee. Tell us a little about how you came to Apogee Journal. What brought you here? Safia Jama [SJ]: I bought my first copy of Apogee Journal at the Housing Works Bookstore two years ago. I saw a painting of a black woman on the cover, her hands clasped over a white dress. (I later realized this ‘painting’ was in fact a beautiful photograph by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.) Riding the subway home, I began to read this journal that seemed unlike any other. I remember how my own brown hands mirrored the hands on the journal’s cover. I read an interview with Rich Benjamin. In it, he talks about his study of “whiteopias,” the virtually all-white communities situated near idyllic nature settings. I remember thinking about mountains and rivers and white people hiking with their families as I rode the F train back to my ethnically diverse neighborhood in...

Uncategorized

Interview with Apogee Journal's New Staff: Esmé-Michelle Watkins

Apogee Journal

02 Feb 2016

Apogee Journal is excited to welcome Esmé-Michelle Watkins as our newest Fiction Editor on our editorial team. See what she has to say about being a writer and lawyer, literary justice, and the book that was so spectacular, she threw it against the wall. Apogee Journal [AJ]: Welcome to Apogee Journal! As a fiction writer and attorney, you are part of a long legacy of lawyer-poets from Wallace Stevens to Monica Youn. How do you see these two aspects of your working life coming together? Does one influence the other? If so, how? Esmé-Michelle Watkins [EW]: I became an attorney because I am immensely concerned with effecting justice in the world. I suppose I am a writer for the same reason. The most elemental function of language is to control an experience or history by describing it. If our cultural histories are not embraced by language in this way, they are subject to erasure. Growing up, I didn’t come across too many fictional characters who looked or sounded like me or folks in my family. It was clear from an early age that we were part of a periphery that wasn’t always celebrated in the canon. I think we’ve...

Nonfiction

NONFICTION: Year of the Jack Rabbit, Hannah Lee Jones

Apogee Journal

01 Feb 2016

Year of the Jack Rabbit Hannah Lee Jones Happy new year of marveling how different and alike we are, in a Korean restaurant so busy that I’m squeezed against an Indian mother who’s with a boy who looks more like me than her. I’m puzzling this out when she explains that her son is by the counter and the one beside me is his friend, together for a Lunar New Year that’s two weeks of bao and sticky rice and strangers around tables like ours, a scrim of bamboo leaves on one end and steaming bowls of manduguk on the other. Our waitress reminds me of my aunt who just died, the leather-jacketed guy in the corner is a doppelgänger of my father at 20 and I’m pretending this kid with soup glazing his chin is my little brother. It’s hot, he complains. I tell him I hear him: hot like the wild-eyed horses our ancestors rode thundering over deserts you and I will never see. Hot like my father at 22 looking like a Mongolian John Wayne, but that was in pictures. Now I’m outside the corner store watching lion dancers wish the owners a year of good fortune,...