Hilary Zaid couldn’t have known, when she was writing Forget I Told You This, that Elon Musk was planning to change the name of Twitter to X, though she had probably already seen Facebook become Meta. These name changes indicate a shift in the tech age, a move from an...
The first thing I noticed on the way to the first event I attended at my first-ever Unbound Book Festival was the groups of men with buckets at the intersection of 9th and Broadway in Columbia, Missouri. If they weren’t frat boys, they sure seemed like it — matching...
Oddball Hoedown, an up-and-coming, gender-inclusive folk-dance organization in Kansas City, Missouri, hosted their inaugural event on an unseasonably warm February night at 9th & State. Built in 1911 by Pabst Brewery in West Bottoms on the “wettest block in the...
A Dream Inherited: “We could be rich.”Anna, a single woman in her late 20s, filed for a homestead in 1905. In 2013, Erika Bolstad, her great-granddaughter, digs up the past, giving Anna the voice she never had. All Bolstad knew about Anna was that she settled in the...
Not many fairy tales have been set in the Midwest, but Jasmine Sawers, who lives outside of St. Louis, draws on its history and their own mixed heritage in their debut story collection The Anchored World: Flash Fairy Tales and Folklore. Sawers also pulls from the...
In her new essay collection, Sarah Fawn Montgomery begins with “Excavation,” in which each section ties the mining of the narrator’s childhood memories and finding buried treasure with ruminations on the acts of burial. From the outset, Montgomery’s rich, lyrical...
