Features Blog

Our final blog in our Women’s History Month series features poet Susan Rich and her poignant look at the COVID-19 pandemic. Please enjoy this incredible work, and don’t forget to share!

Today’s blog post recognizes Khanh Ha with an excerpt from his novel Diary of a Mute Girl. Ha was recently selected as the winner of the 2020-21 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction, awarded by Bayou Magazine and the University of New Orleans. We are proud to count him as part of the Solstice family! Please enjoy this piece, and don’t forget to share!

For Women’s History Month, Solstice is highlighting several of our authors from the Winter 2020 issue who are women and/or who celebrate women in their writing. Today’s post is a piece of nonfiction from Rani Neutill. Enjoy, and please share!

The final poet featured in our Black History Month blog is Marcus Jackson with his poem “A Type of Crying” from the Spring 2019 issue.

Another poet from our Spring 2020 issue, Valerie Smith is the next featured Black author in our Black History Month blog with her poem “Expert of the Apricot Groves.”

The next featured Black author in honor of Black History Month is fiction author Ruth Mukwana and her short story “Cracked.” Please also visit the links to listen to her latest podcast episode.

Today’s Black History Month blog highlights Quintin Collins and his poem “Crushed.”

The next blog in our Black History Month series highlights Artress Bethany White and her poem “Severed: A Statement on the Ludicrous Nature of African Repatriation.”

Our next Black History Month blog honoring Solstice’s Black authors features Bonita Lee Penn’s poem “Nina’s Fire: Frantic’s Go-Go” from the Winter 2020 issue.

The next poet featured in our Black History Month blog is Matthew E. Henry (MEH) with his poem from the Spring 2020 issue “an open letter to my mixed little ‘Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals’.”

Next in our Black History Month blog is Vernita Hall and her poem from the Summer 2020 issue “The World According to Alpheaus.”

As part of our ongoing celebration of Black History Month at Solstice, we will be highlighting Black authors who have been published in both our print and online magazines over the past several years. The first blog features Tatiana Johnson-Boria and her nonfiction/poetry hybrid piece “The Uprooting.”

Graphic Lit contributor Grace Desmarais brings us a very personal comic about mental health.

This Graphic Lit piece is a mashup of a public domain children’s book, The Adventures of the Three Bold Babes, by S. Rosamond Praeger, published in 1897 and blog advice on dealing with toddlers’ tantrums—and includes erasure and collage.

The Color of Fear, tackles some of the emotions many in our community felt in recent weeks. The author, Anne McGrath collaborated with artist Casey Taylor on this raw piece of flash fiction which arcs from despair to hope.

The first post in a new Graphic Lit blog series, this wonderful new blog by Minnesota based comic artist Kyle Harabedian. Dining In is an intimate look at quarantine life which is masterfully conveyed through Kyle’s unique art style.

2012 was the first year I was eligible to cast a vote for President. I was 20 years old, a student at a small liberal arts college that was proud to boast about 1,000 students total in a rural swath of Western North Carolina, just south of Asheville. We were as far...

the stale smell of adolescence lingers still in the varnished wood floors and bleachers of my high school gymnasium. Memories aged fifty years now are just that: faded but not gone, like a scar from an ancient wound or the sting of a racist slight. Only on election...

Let me take you on a trip. It’s right about the turn of the century, and I’m a 15-year-old engrossed in everything normal and expected: blink 182, school, friends, and boys. Except there is one aspect that’s not so normal in my suburban upbringing: my father is not a...

My 28-year-old son turns to me, “You failed, you failed.” We are attempting to discuss the morality of the moment. Is violence against police morally defensible? Is there any case that can be made to not vote? I am attempting to pass on lessons from my youth. He is having none of it. “You failed completely,” he hurls at me in bitter condemnation. “Completely.”

Like every school boy, I was cultured to dine with fine silver;piercing steak with polished tines and cutting with the right.Because eating bare hands in the manner of my forebearsmirrors the manners of every other primate shooting from treeto tree. I recite the...

A deadly disease infects us all. We acquire it from birth. It threatens lives and incites fear. The disease is racism. Black Americans have been subjected to brutality—physically, spiritually, and economically—since their ancestors were forced into slave ships and...

The few times that I’ve walked into the Big Y in Longmeadow, MA, the supermarket closest to the university, at which I teach, I steel myself against the barbed gazes. This is a predominantly white market situated in a predominantly white, affluent suburb. I am less...

Essential: adj. 1: of, relating to or constituting an essence <voting is an ~right of citizenship> <~ oils> 2: of an utmost importance: INDISPENSABLE…Synonyms IMPERATIVE, NECESSARY, NECESSITOUS—essentially adv. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Eleventh...