Over the next 3 weeks, I’ll be sharing 2 short story recommendations per week for a total of recommendations from my collection of collections and anthologies. The short story is such a powerful form, bringing us into a universe for just a short moment of time, and pulling us right back out. I particularly love collecting short story anthologies from used book stores, especially The Best American Short Stories. I encourage you to find the collections and read em yourself. Your local library, bookstore, and author could use the support. Your mind will be better for it.

One of the best things I’ve taken from Twitter is the quote that said “____ is good when you don’t have a bitch in your ear telling you it isn’t.” This could apply to many things and it is particularly relevant to Lil Nas X - especially as he invites us into this Dreamboy era. His debut album MONTERO was released in 2021, leaving a four year gap that allowed him to restart. 2022’s “Late to Da Party (F*CK BET)” filled in the gap with a diss track aimed at much-deserving BET. That brings us to now where the 25-year old artist from Atlanta has come back talking his shit.

My love for music requires me to share my excellent taste so here’s some great music I’ve been listening to that was released last month, plus one project for January. This was fun. Tap in. Add to your music collection, and buy music to support artists.

I had the opportunity to share some work from my poetry collection “24” on February 24th. This is the first showcase I’d been a part of ever. I chose 1 piece from 24 - “Isolation” - and the other two from TWO FOUR - “Nightrun” and “Loose Change”. “Loose Change” was fun given it was a rewrite of “-2_16 Ohno” so I performed “Ohno” as well. These pieces encapsulated many of the important parts of 2024 I felt I needed to share - the grief, the loneliness, the heartbreak, the rage, California, Florence, and so much more. There was one more song I was gonna perform, but I ended up cutting it to stay within the allotted time - even though a few of the acts prior to me went over.

These songs are poetry, which makes sense considering she has a degree in English as told in an interview with Ebony Magazine in 2014. If you laid out the lyrics and read them aloud, it would feel like poetry in the tradition of the late Nikki Giovanni, or Sonia Sanchez or Ruth Forman. “I’m only human/I was just searching for another person to give love to/ Oh, the game left me jaded/ Baby, please/ If you’re looking for a little something more” on “White Doves” is definitely a short little poem you’d find in a Norton Anthology of Black Contemporary Poetry.