​Vanessa Taylor​

Within this imagined landscape of white blue-collar life, there’s the dismissal of Black people that shaped Midwestern cultures. Cities with rich Black culture and history, like Chicago and St. Louis, get pushed into their own class.

​Melissa Stuckey

​Although African Americans have been minorities for the entirety of their history in the Lower Midwest, their presence and experiences in this space brought forth some of the most critical debates, conversations, and issues that gripped the nation in the nineteenth century.

​​Randy A. Simes

Navigating the world as a biracial child can be tricky. While I grew up within a very loving family, sometimes it was difficult to figure out where I fit in to the traditional American racial dichotomy.

Shannon Shelton Miller

In the midst of the mess in Detroit, I think of the many children deprived of the opportunity to spend their days with someone like my dad.

Ruth Terry

But soon I realized that as much as I was exoticizing them, they were exoticizing me. Many students knew each other from feeder schools like Grand Rapids Christian High, Holland Christian, or Timothy Christian near Chicago.

Jonita Davis

I was momentarily floored by the rampant misinformation and bigoted, anti-Black statements. But, Indiana, outside of the Northwest corner abutting Chicago and a few spots near Indianapolis, was a red state.

Marissa Jackson Sow

Classmates laughed at our old car, my kinky hair, and my bulky corduroy pants. The ’90s — the era of the Huxtables and Living Single — were about upward mobility, conformity, and respectability amongst the petit bourgeoisie.

​Walter Johnson

Even a moderate rain can flood the intersections and lowlands of Centreville. When it rains heavily, much of the town is submerged in two or three feet of water. Water wears away at the foundations of homes and shorts out furnaces and hot water heaters.

​Mark V. Reynolds

The Cuyahoga essentially divides Cleveland into the East Side and the West Side. But the divisions between those two sides aren’t just geographical, dictated by nature’s path. Once you clear the downtown area, the East Side is where the black folk live, and the West Side is where the white folk live.

L.L. McKinney

The questions are relatively harmless, and the sharp fascination with my cadence and the rhythm of my mumbling meter can be amusing. Sometimes I indulge these requests for linguistic gymnastics, letting words roll off my tongue as I juggle letters like a circus performer, swapping them back and forth, cutting them out entirely or forcing them in where they weren’t before[...]

​Tara L. Conley

I only​ know weathered women. Women like my great-grandmother who stared at the lines on her palm to predict a change in the air. Like my aunt, an exercise instructor who ran away to Chicago only to return home with a stroke[…]

​Britt Julious

​Black girlhood is summer. It arrives quick and dies just as fast. Suddenly we are young women, even if we don’t feel it, even if we know intrinsically there is life left to live

​Marlon James

Because we are the most northern of the north, especially in the many fucked up ways the state views and acts on issues of race, and not just in asserting that second amendment rights were only meant for white people

John Samuel Wright

There was another, lesser-known Great Migration going on in the early 20th century–but in reverse, from the North back to the South, by northern-born African Americans seeking professional opportunities; and it included my aunt, my father, and my mother[..]

​Zaakiyyah Najeebah Dumas O’Neal

My Black womanhood has always felt like a cloak of safety in Chicago. I have been so fortunate to spend a lot of time watching people on buses and trains, and walking through neighborhoods that are not my own to write poems[…]

​Michele Goodwin

One that is picturesque, peaceful, artistic, environmentally mindful—and hip. Those things are true too for people of color. However, it is also a place of fear, hostility, passive-aggression and lack of mindfulness regarding race.

Hanif Abdurraquib

For most of my adult years in Columbus, I have been thinking about the way monuments can vanish. For the kids in my east-side neighborhood, downtown was a distant planet, only a few miles and an entire universe away from where we kicked broken glass off of basketball courts or climbed atop the roofs of neglected school buildings.

Ali Black

A week ago, I was up during the middle of the night trying to figure out if I was really having chest pains or if I was just tripping. Until now, I didn’t realize that these chest pains could have been attributed to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery or the exhausting situation between Amy Cooper and Christian Cooper

​Chris Bournea

In the late 1960s through the 1970s, Franklin Park was a community gathering place for African Americans every Sunday afternoon, spring through fall.

​Miela Fetaw

It is Saturday morning and I have spent all weekend packing up my belongings from my parents northside Milwaukee home into my first apartment. Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” is on repeat. My best friend and now roommate is on the opposite side of town doing the same; it will be her first time living on the northside.