Anne-Flore arrived early one dawn as the inescapable proof of the mercy of God. She was born in October 2019 during the height of what came to be known in Haiti as peyilok, a country-wide lockdown stretching over a period of about three months that was radical and revolutionary, but also violent, disorganized and ultimately trying for all parties involved. The early morning of Anne-Flore’s birth was similar to many others during that period. It followed a long, tension-filled night, the darkness of which was broken by barricade fires, and the light of rubber tires aflame. Whirling smoke suffocated the moon and the stars.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s journey begins among the tumbleweeds of Texas and finishes with a crawl over the Rockies and a descent into the fertile Snake River Valley. Her new book, American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, is an attempt to reconcile what she calls “the divide” between urbanites like herself and Americans living in the flyover states.

I crouched on the carpeted floor in front of my space heater, my eyes swollen from crying. For days it had been giving off less and less heat, shutting down for a few minutes at a time before willing itself back to life. Now the heater huffed its final hot breaths. When it died completely, I did not think, “I need to grow a garden.”

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our annual Spring Contest, which was judged by Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction. We want to thank everyone who entered the Contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. Winners and runner ups will be posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2020.

“Everything starts with garlic,” Grandma Sally said as I stretched on tiptoe. As I balanced gripping the metal oven door handle when I was hip high to her. As she pressed her belly into the oven door rather than tell me to stop. As my bare toes crunched papery garlic skin that had fluttered to the floor with the linoleum divot in front of the oven.

All through that year, we believed in magic: magic that had the power to set things right, turn the ship around, get us out of there unscathed.

People always asked what we were doing there. The rehearsed line I said when people asked was, “We’re expatriates.” In my eight-year-old mind this word that came out like scrap metal meant, “white-people permanently not in white-people land.” That was the only way I had ever heard it applied. I knew I wasn’t Mexican. I didn’t consider myself American. Most of our friends, though fluent in Spanish, were other white people from English-speaking countries. They too were expatriates.

Although Kay Ryan has earned nearly every accolade a poet can dream of—Pulitzer Prize winner, Guggenheim Fellow, National Humanities Medal recipient, and Poet Laureate of the United States, to name a few—Synthesizing Gravity is her first collected work of prose. The title comes from her commentary on Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s poems: “They must synthesize gravity, direction, time, substance. They can’t use anyone else’s.” This idea feels both essential and antithetical to Ryan’s selected prose, where her unique style so often comes out of commenting on the work of others.

In her latest collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You., Samantha Irby details life now that she’s forty, married, and living in the Midwest with her wife. Though (spoiler alert) depression has followed her from Chicago, Irby’s collection shows a little more vulnerability and a little less deflection than her previous books. She has a way of making you feel close to her. Despite proclaiming that much of her work (including her previous books Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life) has been primarily “about butts,” Irby delivers essays in Wow, No Thank You that are pithy, laugh-until-you-bend-over-funny and insightful.

Two days after I watched Pan’s Labyrinth and practiced self-awareness with Meshkov, my spiritual guru, I was walking down Marshal Zhukov Street and sniffing my hand—every finger, my palm, and even nails—but for nothing. There was no smell. That didn’t stop me. I treaded towards the crowd gathered around an office building. Some of them were smoking. As soon as I passed them and the air was clear again, I sniffed my shoulder and the upper part of my arm. Nothing.

The woods were a kaleidoscope of women. Tall, rangy women with muscled arms in cut offs. Women with mohawks in their best butch leather get-ups. Women cutting onions and serving veggie burritos, women hanging off the back of beat-up pick-up trucks as they made recycling rounds, and women preparing to perform nightly under the moon and stars. Women sprinkled everywhere on the lush Michigan land that lay empty eleven months of the year. It’s hard to imagine anywhere else with a greater concentration of pheromones wafting through the air than here, in these ferns and forest. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was the perfect place for romance – and sex.

I entered the world a textbook case. My earliest thoughts were, I am a boy. I behaved traditionally male in every way, eschewing girl’s toys, books, games, clothing, monikers. At four, I asked my parents for “sex change surgery.”

Based on her 2015 Vice article, “London, Ontario was a Racist Asshole to Me,” Eternity Martis wrote a memoir of her time in college, They Said This Would be Fun, which comes out this March 31. The book follows Martis’ time at Western University and the racism and sexism she experienced there. This is not a book about one time or place, though. The systemic issues and lack of formal policy to bring stories like hers to light are widespread. Martis writes about the body in stressful and harmful times, boyfriends gone so wrong they dip into Greek tragedy, and separates the chapters with pithy interstitials named “The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students.” Her memoir dives into friendship, family connection and growing up as a woman. It is her first of a two-book deal with McClelland & Stewart. In this interview, Columbia Journal’s Online Translation Editor Stephanie Philp caught up with her over the phone. Eternity Martis is an award-winning Toronto-based journalist and editor whose work has been featured in The Huffington Post, VICE, Chatelaine, Canadaland, Salon, CBC, Hazlitt, The Walrus, The Ryerson Review of Journalism, J-Source, Xtra, The Fader, Complex and many more.

Harry Dodge is well known as a visual artist whose works are in the permanent collection of museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. My Meteorite or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing is his first book, and it is as experimental in form and subject as his other creations. Like all works of art, it is an attempt to create patterns, to impose some order on our experience of the world. While the book has many virtues, it sometimes fails in that task, leaving us with a postmodern sense of randomness to which the book’s subtitle bows.

One overcast Saturday morning, eight months after my father’s suicide, my seventh-grade baseball team spent an hour practicing drag bunts. Unlike most bunts, which are designed to move existing baserunners while sacrificing the batter, the purpose of a drag bunt is to earn a base hit. When drag bunting, batters should remain in their normal upright stance as long as possible, pretend they want to swing hard until the pitcher is about to release the ball. Good drag bunters are con artists. They convince infielders to position themselves for line drives, far from the plate and the danger of hard hits. After they have fooled the fielders, drag bunters try to make soft contact with the ball so that it bounces slowly toward the first or third base foul line.

When my mother was a baby her father threw her into the ocean so she would be forced to learn to swim. It didn’t work.

In this interview, Editor-in-Chief spoke with writer Sarah Ramey about her debut memoir, The Lady’s Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness (Doubleday), a book that examines the author’s years-long battle with an illness that doctors found themselves unable to diagnose and the overall treatment of women’s pain in the U.S. healthcare system. Here, she discusses the role structure plays in the work, the process of healing through research, and why she does not mind calling herself a “hope monger.”

In this interview, Sarah Gheyas spoke to Peter Frankopan about his latest book, The New Silk Roads, which looks at the shifting geopolitics and the rising global influence of industrial powerhouses of Central Asia. Peter Frankopan authored the highly acclaimed international bestseller, The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World (Bloomsbury 2018) and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury 2015), both of which have been translated into more than thirty languages. Other notable books include a revised translation of The Alexiad (Penguin Classics 2009) and The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Harvard University Press, 2012). He’s written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The London Evening Standard. Prospect Magazine named him One of the World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019. He currently chairs the Ondaatje Prize at the Royal Society of Literature, the Cundill History Prize and the Runciman Book Prize. He is professor of Global History at Oxford University, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is also the founder of the hotel franchise, A Curious Group of Hotels.

I had forgotten what wet felt like. Perspiration pooling from my pink water jug on the side table next to my hospice bed—how it grew. Clanking of ice cubes in my mother’s glass settling on top of the side table—how they created waves. Pellets of rain that leaked through the window sill—how they jumped from the ledge and awaited the floor. Even their mud, my fresh blood—how they created sludge on the cloudy floor. How they knew I was thirsty.

Nina St. Pierre speaks with author Paul Lisicky in this interview about his sixth book, the memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World. Set in the early ’90s, Later is a prismatic rendering of life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the height of the HIV and AIDs epidemic. In Later, Lisicky renders it a one-word mythology: “Town”—a location both in and out of time, where the synthesis between death, sex, and community, is nuanced, contradictory, and ultimately, life-affirming.