Read the full article here.

Read the full article here.

“It was at least a secure category…there were certain kinds of assumptions around being a middle class person that have now kind of shattered”

Many of the workers risking their lives amid the pandemic are burdened with student debt. We owe them more than just applause.

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Alissa Quart on “In Ballard”

The event was a family vacation, in a rapidly gentrified neighborhood in a Northwestern city. The month was August, the end of the summer, a time when some people get manic from the increased light, like Norwegians finally seeing sun. My age was early middle. My professional anxiety was unusually high, as if to match the climate-weird hot temperature around me. By that year, 2015, newspapers had seen forty five percent of their jobs shrink since 2004, with freelance pay sometimes below minimum wage.

Over the course of the 48 hours in which I wrote “In Ballard,” I underwent what could be called an extended panic.

I was a lifelong freelancer, who also ran an organization devoted to journalists writing on inequality as they tried to survive themselves. I had started to report a book on the subject as well. In other words, I personalized my industry’s vulnerability:

Read the full piece here.

Everything can go/on the grill: A combined review of Alissa Quart

Forgive me if I emphasize the thought over the lyricism, but “everything goes/on the grill” in Alissa Quart’s capacious writing. Her recent prose (Squeezed, 2018) and poetry (Thoughts & Prayers, 2019) appeal to both my “Creative Writing” as well as my “Critical Thinking” sides—or what some college composition classes call pathos, logos, and ethos and some poets call music, logos, and image, and in the process, Quart is able to reframe the relationship between the ‘public’ and ‘private,’ commercial and non-commercial, seriousness and humor, work and care, as well as the stigma of the ‘Jewish mother’ stereotype.

Read the full review here.

Rethinking ‘resilience’ and ‘grit’

Christine “Cissy” White is an advocate for survivors of trauma and is one herself. The 52-year-old lives in Weymouth, Mass., earning her living as a community facilitator for an organization that provides a social media hub and other forms of support to people who have struggled as she did.

Helping others in this way is also her personal passion: she experienced many setbacks. White’s mother was just a teen when White was born and throughout much of her childhood, her mother was the sole provider — her mother’s first husband was violent, homeless, and absent. Growing up poor, she would hide the tape and paper clips that held her broken glasses together behind her bangs. She said she was “not hungry” when she was out with friends and starving but couldn’t afford food, and she used paper towels instead of tampons when she was a teenager because she couldn’t afford them, either.

Read the full article here.

Thoughts And Prayers’ Author On How To Recover The Meaning Of Words We Use Again And Again

Here & Now’s Lisa Mullins speaks with Alissa Quart (@lisquart), author of poetry book “Thoughts and Prayers” about how to recover the true meaning of words that we use again and again in the news and in our culture.

Read the full radio show here.

We Need More Poetry in Politics

Camonghne Felix became the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in June. She is also the author of “Build Yourself a Boat,” a debut collection of poetry that was recently included on the long list for a National Book Award. Ms. Felix’s writings describe sexual assault, firsthand experience of abortion, and police violence, including poems about the trial of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin.

Read the full op-ed here.

Where Poetry Meets Journalism

For nearly two weeks in 2018, poet Doug Van Gundy and photographer Matt Eich interviewed residents of Webster County, West Virginia. They talked with gravediggers and teachers and diner cooks. They had coffee with an ex-military man who sold sawmill equipment; they visited the county clerk’s office, filled with boxes of election materials; they watched an elementary school Christmas play and concert. All along the way they asked those they met: What is it like to live here? What do you wish others knew about your life? With permission Van Gundy would record each conversation or take notes, and Eich would make photographs.

Read the full profile here.

Alissa Quart talks with us about the “dark poetry” of American politics

Through her work as both a writer and the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Quart is all about clueing people into what she calls the “dark poetry around them.” Thoughts and Prayers is no exception, dexterously speaking to the calamity and melodrama of our current political climate using the hybrid form of reported poetry. “I see this as a meta-text, a text around the journalism,” says Quart, a prolific journalist who has also written several nonfiction books on topics such as consumer culture and middle class precarity. “Sometimes journalism gets locked into the literal truth,” she says. “Potentially, a form like poetry or other kinds of more explosive, disruptive forms of culture could be telling the emotional truth of our period, especially the Trump era.”

Read the full interview here.

On the anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting, Alissa Quart shares a poem about gun violence.

The U.S. is a country plagued by gun violence. Its shadow looms everywhere — over school hallways, movie theaters, concert venues and homes. On this day two years ago, a mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival saw 59 killed and 527 injured. The statistics are sobering; the causes, well documented. But these horrific acts of violence are often met with the same empty words from political leaders, who offer “thoughts and prayers” but so little in the way of tangible solutions.

Author Alissa Quart’s book of poetry, Thoughts and Prayers, explores the darkness and numbness that is such a part of our current political existence.

As Quart told Teen Vogue, “The title poem is composed of the public language around mourning over school shootings in the U.S. or from political leaders and Web sites. I also sifted through the language that politicians of both parties tweet, what kids themselves said about mass shootings, and the words companies use in fabricating souvenirs that commodify mass killings.”

Read the full poem here.

David Berman of Silver Jews Remembered

The lead singer of the indie rock band Silver Jews, David Berman, died last month at fifty-two, a suicide in Brooklyn. While he might at first glance appear just another icon of Gen X, an embarrassing phrase back in the day that now it seems accurate, Berman reflected that generation’s ironic, dark hunches about existence. As he put it in one song:

What if life is just some hard equation
On a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?
You can live again,
But you’ll have to die twice in the end.

The Silver Jews’ most renowned albums, The Natural Bridge and American Water, were made during the 1990s, a decade where the shrug was a key artistic gesture, albeit an ominous shrug.

Read the full piece here.

Let’s push the language of journalism past its limits

TWO YEARS INTO Donald Trump’s presidency, journalists and pundits seem hard-pressed for new, effective ways to describe each fresh outrage. That may be because we’ve reached the limits of journalism’s typical lingo and genres—of the blaring 24-hour news cycle, in which news outlets endlessly refresh their coverage of a worsening incident, framed by “BREAKING NEWS” chyrons that repeat our president’s racist Twitter commentary.

Read the full essay here here.