Essential Voices

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 fromThe 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 PErez I Cut Up My Hillary T-shirt to Make aCOVID 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 PErez A Sonnet for the Living Poetry |Bianca Alyssa PErez #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 BodhrAn 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 BodhrAn 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

"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