Essential Voices

Description

A collection of creative writing and art about COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic by people from vulnerable populations. Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices.

Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.

A collection of creative writing and art about COVID-19 at the onset of the pandemic by people from vulnerable populations.

“The work is emotionally moving. The attention to the quotidian, lived experiences of those affected offers unique insights into a global catastrophe that has turned precious lives and deaths into statistics. . . . An important cultural response.”
Darius Bost, author of Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence “This is a text of powerful firsthand accounts that capture the current context in critical and intersectional ways that are attentive to how individual lives are shaped by structural realities. It is important that these voices are engaged.”
Nana Osei-Kofi, Oregon State University

Amy M. Alvarez is an Affrilachian poet and professor living in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Pamela Gemme is a poet, artist, and creative writing tutor from Massachusetts.

Shana Hill is a poet and founder of Poetica Pastor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Alexis Ivy is a poet and outreach advocate for homeless people in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

List of Illustrations

Foreword | Maria del Guadalupe Davidson Introduction

Acknowledgments

Fear: It lives in droplets

Monster under Me
Fiction | Nathan Blalock Table of Contents for a Manual of Pandemic Response Protocols
Poetry | Rasha Abdulhadi The Worst of Times
Essay | Frances Ogamba Essentials
Poetry | Maria James-Thiaw Recipe for Troubled Times
Poetry | Linda Parsons Night Guard
Poetry | Linda Parsons Pandemic Pandemonium
Poetry | Kenneth Moore Even the Robins Know
Poetry | Robert Okaji Distance: As we moan into the phone

How Corona Evolves or Makes Us Evolve, or We Have to Evolve Together
Poetry | Xiaoly Li Sequestered Alone
Poetry | Joan Hofmann To whom it may concern,
Letter and Poetry | Alyce Copeland Love in the Time of Corona
Poetry | John Cuetara What We Know about the Fatalities
Fiction | Lisa Michelle Moore Do Lockdowns Ever End?
Poetry | Diego Islas Wish You Were Here
Poetry | Joan Goodreau Comfort
Poetry | Celeste Blair Didn’t We Once Call It Love?
Poetry | E. Ethelbert Miller The Cheat
Poetry | Rayna Momen How I’ve Survived This Long, Part 3
Poetry | Kasha Martin Gauthier What it’s like to get married in prison during a pandemic
Essay | Christopher Blackwell Mask: A parachute that catches my breath

Invisi dis ability in COVID Times
Essay | Catherine Young Corona Spring
Poetry | Deborah DeNicola Unmasked
Poetry | Faiza Anum The Fabric of Society
Fiction | Alice Benson Masked
Poetry | Christine Rhein Melt Down
Poetry | Mary K O’Melveny May 6, 2020
Poetry | Kevin McLellan Barriers
Essay | Robbie Gamble from The Quarantinas Poetry | Stephanie Lenox Labor: Warnings on the floor

Bezos Knows
Poetry | Ranney Campbell We Are Family: A Lesson Learned as an On-line English Teacher during COVID-19
Essay | Maya Lear Brewer Line Speed
Poetry | Ben Gunsberg Staying Socially and Politically Active while Socially Distancing: Making the Issues around COVID-19 Part of One’s Activism
Essay | C. Liegh McInnis Essential Medical Workers Are to Report to Duty
Poetry | Michele Bombardier These Hands
Fiction | Z. S. Roe Postcard from Pandemic
Poetry | Robert Okaji A Classroom Hums in Wait.
Poetry | Vanessa Chica Ferreira Sickness: My stomach charlie-horsed

My COVID Story
Essay | Brett L. Massey Essentially Unseen
Poetry | Lavinia Kumar Nudge
Poetry | Phrieda Bogere Elegy
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez I Cut Up My Hillary T-shirt to Make a COVID Mask
Poetry | Joan E. Bauer A Story of Constantine, COVID-19, and Pandora
Fiction | Waliyah Oladipo New Age
Poetry | Robert J. Levy Alcohol Woman
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees Grief: Interjected like a comma

Elegy, Interrupted
Poetry | Emily Ransdell My Mother Whispers, Doesn’t He Look So Peaceful
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez A Sonnet for the Living
Poetry | Bianca Alyssa Pérez #covidclarity
Essay | Marcelle Mentor Trapped
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees Love, Coronavirus
Poetry | Lisa Suhair Majaj A Poet Attempts to Homeschool, Week 6: Fractions
Poetry | Kasha Martin Gauthier Evaporating Villanelle during a Time of Pandemic
Poetry | Jen Karetnick A Day in the Life
Essay | Eric Ebers What You Want to Say
Poetry | Maria Rouphail Zoom Funeral
Poetry | Laura Glenn For Jon, Who Died Because of Time
Poetry | Rayna Momen Survival: Remember every surface you touch

Essential Nonessentials in Lockdown
Poetry | Katy Giebenhain The Eaters
Fiction | Danielle Lauren Off-Script
Poetry | Monserrat Escobar Arteaga Heroes
Fiction | Mark Brazaitis 15 Mar 2020—A (a roll in the hand is worth two on the shelf) Haiku
Poetry | Peter Joel We Will Sing of Gone Bodies Some Days from Now
Poetry | Blessing Omeiza Ojo In Times of Quarantine
Poetry | Rosalie Hendon Halmoni’s Kimchi Pancakes
Recipe | Elia Min COVID Curriculum
Essay | Dominique Traverse Locke Monkeys
Poetry | Fabiyas M V Justice and Reckoning: Colonial co-morbidities

How to Make White Supremacy Generative/How to Survive a Pandemic
Essay | Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán Blackout
Poetry | Thomas Beckwith The Marrow-Sucking Grip of Immigration Injustice
Poetry | Kim Denning White
Poetry | Roan Davis we’ve been here before
Poetry | Liseli A. Fitzpatrick Crosstown
Poetry | Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán My Uncertain Story
Essay | Noe Hernandez Em Ontvlecetv / Invaded
Poetry | Deidra Suwanee Dees POV
Poetry | Jameka Hartley The Home of the Brave
Poetry | David Antonio Reyes Things I Never Told You
Poetry | Steve Ramirez Environment and Place: Let the river turn the stone

Lines before Lockdown
Poetry | Lisa Suhair Majaj hymn
Poetry | Caroline Furr May Shivers
Poetry | Lukpata Lomba Joseph For the emptiers have emptied them out
Poetry | Alan Smith Soto While the World Fell Apart around Us
Poetry | Aimee Nicole COVID Spring Comes to Southeast Pennsylvania
Poetry | Kenneth Pobo 2020
Poetry | Yuan Changming Folded Up
Poetry | donnarkevic Social Distance
Poetry | Fred Shaw Austin
Poetry | Jeffrey Taylor Hope: Beyond sorrow there’s a gardenia tree

During quarantine, I embrace myself as a long-hauler,
Poetry | Jen Karetnick Magdalena
Poetry | Deborah “Deby” Rodriguez Too Loud to Sleep
Essay | Natalie Mislang Mann When the Games Return
Poetry | E. Ethelbert Miller Wasted
Essay | Celeste Blair This Is Not the End of the World
Poetry | Darius Atefat-Peckham Touch Screen
Fiction | Mohini Malhotra Notes
Contributors
About the Editors

Bringing together artwork, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, Essential Voices shares the perspectives of people from vulnerable populations as they were affected by COVID-19 in 2020, before the release of the vaccine. The pieces in this volume represent a range of writers and artists, some from international locations, whose work may be less likely to be seen because of race, ethnicity, or current legal status. Contributors include individuals who identify as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, or seniors; those who are immunocompromised or undocumented; those working in medicine, food service, factories, and sanitation; and parents who were unable to work from home, along with individuals who were being held in correctional facilities or facing mental health concerns. This multigenre collection preserves the history of the pandemic by documenting and publishing these essential voices.

Essential Voices will be of interest to readers who want to consider the diverse lived experiences of people during the pandemic when outcomes were most uncertain. It will also be useful for teachers, students, activists, and policy makers in a variety of settings, including government, hospitals, prisons, homeless shelters, colleges, art schools, and secondary schools.

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 6 × 9 in