When I started thinking about the theme for this issue of the journal, I couldn’t get my mind off “witnessing.” Maybe because sometimes I feel like all I can do is witness and witness and witness the things this country is doing, has done, and will do to my people and all people.

Read the full guest editor letter from Ashley M. Jones

Guest Editor’s Spotlight:
On Time by Xavier Burgin

Trading Beads by Yvonne

Vulnerability Study by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

A Lashing by Laura Secord

Reeducated in a Rural Village in Beijing by Xiaoly Li

Urban Pastoral in Stereo: 3 Audio Pieces by Saleem [h.u.e.] Penny

Your Addiction Has Affected Me in the Following Ways by L Mari Harris

Family Matter by Ellen Stone

I Blues tha Rain, 40 Days & 40 Nights by henry 7. reneau, jr.

Selections from Kwoya Fagin Maples’ Mend

Cookie by Cover Artist Amoxes

Review: The Typists Play Monopoly by Kathleen McClung

Rachel Nix Interviews Samantha Lamph/Len and Kevin D. Woodall of Memoir Mixtapes

Rachel Nix Interviews Ashley M. Jones

About Our Guest Editor
Ashley M. Jones is a poet, organizer, and educator from Birmingham, Alabama. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017) and dark / / thing (Pleiades Press, 2019). Her poetry has earned local and national awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama.