Writers of Color Archives - The New Territory Magazine

José Olivarez – Calumet City, Illinois

José Olivarez & Calumet City—maps might make the world legible, but poetry reveals “the little cracks in the totality.” Literary Landscapes by Ava Tomasula y Garcia.

Toni Morrison – Cleveland, Ohio

Euclid Ave mural—on Black women lifting up one another, because as Morrison said, “the function of freedom is to free someone else.”

Toni Morrison – Chesapeake Bay, Maryland

Driving along the Bay, trying to experience the place concretely, seeing the links between past and present, proximate and distant.

Toni Morrison – Lorain, Ohio

Toni Morrison’s childhood home—Black American resilience amidst the shared, cruel landscapes of white supremacy in Lorain, OH.

Toni Morrison – West Point, New York

Speaking to Plebes, Morrison makes “the auditorium, alive with the resonance of storytelling,” a space of racial belonging.

Toni Morrison – Lorain, Ohio

Lakeview Park—exploring the traumas experienced by young Black girls in The Bluest Eye and reclaiming the park as a space for healing.

Peter H. Clark – St. Louis, Missouri

Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for relationship-building.

Sojourner Truth – Battle Creek, Michigan

Harmonia was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included a store, a blacksmith shop, and a seminary.

Rachel – Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin

In 1834, 20-year-old Rachel petitioned the St. Louis Circuit Court for her freedom, after she had been held in slavery in Ft. Snelling and Ft. Crawford, WI.

Gordon Parks – Fort Scott, Kansas

Gordon Parks & the Marmaton River—walking the cracked bottom of the gulch, following the “documentarian of a watershed century.”

Hugo Martinez-Serros – Chicago, Illinois

Hugo Martinez-Serros & South Chicago City Dump—Depression-era salvage in a “a great raw sore on the landscape.”

Malcolm X – Omaha, Nebraska

3448 Pinkney Street—the site of Malcolm X’s first home offers a more complex portrait of Midwestern mythologies.

Richard Wright – Chicago, Illinois

Richard Wright house—a modest brownstone among “great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.”

Heid E. Erdrich – Minneapolis, Minnesota

Heid Erdrich & All My Relations art gallery—“imaginative language-meaning” in the American Indian Cultural Corridor.

Gwendolyn Brooks – Chicago, Illinois

Gwendolyn Brooks & South Side Community Art Center—looking back toward Bronzeville: Brooks’s voice above the hum. #LiteraryLandscapes

James Emanuel – Alliance, Nebraska

Two generations finding “my truth and my refuge” at the Alliance Public Library. #LiteraryLandscapes by Sean Stewart.

Sandra Cisneros – Chicago, Illinois

Humboldt Park—where the condo that replaced the house on Mango Street “has an attenuated look, seeming to both belong and not belong.”

John Joseph Mathews – Osage County, Oklahoma

LiteraryLandscapes: Tallgrass Prairie Preserve—Mason Whitehorn Powell on John Joseph Mathews, Osage identity, and becoming a part of the balance in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.