virgilsaunders

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Roughly 85% of corporate executives and board members are white men. This number hasn’t budged for decades, which suggests that white men are continuing to select and promote other white men.

Women and minorities are scrutinized when they try to favor those like them, in a way that white men are not.

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The New Yorker: Nov. 2, 2015

Poem: “Birdsong After a Sleepless Night” by Gibbons Ruark

What’s early for him for me is very late.

Story: “The Gospel According to Garcia” by Ariel Dorfman

The world is cursed because people do not apologize for their sins or crimes or merely their cowardice, but it’s even more cursed because people apologize much too much—they use their regrets as a way of not really probing what they have done, as permission to persevere in their blindness, absolving themselves without having atoned or understood.

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The New Yorker: Oct. 26, 2015

Poem: “Green Migraine” by Michael Dickman

The night was green the morning was green and now it’s late afternoon inside of a lawnmower

Story: “Who Will Greet You at Home” by Lesley Nneka Arimah 

If she was to mother a child, to mute and subdue and fold away parts of herself, the child had to be perfect.

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I would go to Mars if I wasn’t too short for Nasa’s height restrictions, I’d tell them, “You can fit more short people onto a rocket, Don’t worry about my bone deterioration rate, I had arthritis at 13, walked like an old lady at 20, It’d be nice to float and give my old bones a break.”

Was honored to read some poetry Friday night at Wall of Books in Washington, D.C. along with Tara Campbell, Meg Eden, and Grace Pasco for our friend Marlena Chertock‘s first poetry book, “On That One-Way Trip to Mars,” published by Bottlecap Press!

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My first personal essay! Thank you @thefemlitmag for publishing this!

My non-black friends suffer from memories that I can hardly imagine, and I don’t doubt the depth of their scars. But I know that certain stains on my sadness are not shared between us; they are not due to a chemical imbalance or personal trauma. They are marks left simply because of the color that I was born.

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The maze of your friends and their thoughts must’ve seemed inconquerable then: it was all too clear how we would crack,

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The newest issue of @alienmouth features three of our authors, Beyza Ozer, Joe Nicholas, and Marlena Chertock. 

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underfunded infrastructure, officially sanctioned ignorance, Arabian horses crushed under the weight of truckloads of bodies picked off Interstate 10, bloated out of the water,

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The New Yorker: Oct. 12, 2015

Poem: “Breasts” by Erica Jong

She used to say, we all go back to earth.

Story: “Usl at the Stadium” by Rivka Galchen

Only bad, mean mothers prepare you for what is to come.

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The first glass of wine is all about the food, the second glass is about love and the third glass is about mayhem.

Marcos Alberti

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There is nothing more companionable than an unread book.

Nuruddin Farah

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Is the artist a liar, or simply one for whom even a fact is not a fact?

Ned Rorem, The Art of the Diary No. 1 (via theparisreview)

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It might be bad, this new situation, but it would be definite, there would be no vagueness or falsehood in it.

Anna Karenina, Part III, p. 287

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Shamming in anything at all can deceive the most intelligent, perceptive person; but the most limited child will recognize it and feel aversion, no matter how artfully it is concealed.

Anna Karenina, Part III, p. 267

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The more he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergei Ivanovich and many other workers for the common good had not been brought to this love of the common good by the heart, but had reasoned in their minds that it was good to be concerned with it and were concerned with it only because of that.

Anna Karenina, Part III, p. 239

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I guess every lonely girl would hope she's a princess.

from the film, Anastasia

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I give my respect to those who've earned it. To everyone else, I'm civil.

from the film, The Deep Blue Sea