"I’ve read comic books since I was nine years old, and even as a child I understood that characters like The Uncanny X-men were intended to function as an allegory for race ..."

"I think of the white space in this poem like that, a place for the speaker to move the poem around, a place to disguise intent, to conceal an America that hides in the silences."

"But there’s a lot that’s disturbing in the world right now, and the more I quiet my mind, the more I can discern what matters."

"Greek mythology was the primary and intuitive way that I understood power within family relationships."

"But this power to ... communicate the full weight of a paradox, to 'say' in one stroke and “unsay” in the next—to me, that’s poetry at its best."

Hugh Sheehy is the author of The Invisibles (University of Georgia Press), winner of the 2012 Flannery O'Connor Award. His fiction has appeared widely, most recently in Story, West Branch, and Five Points. He lives in Beacon, New York and teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature, and in Miami University's Low Residency MFA Program.

Rage Hezekiah is the author of Stray Harbor, recently released by Finishing Line Press. She is a Cave Canem and MacDowell Fellow who earned her MFA from Emerson College.