"Hush" by Darlene Eliot

“When friends come over, I tell them the house shakes because it’s on a fault line. I don’t tell them the house is upset. I don’t tell them the trees tap the windows at night and the wind only blows at dinner time and the floor tilts upstairs, so Sis and I have to lean against the wall to get to our rooms. I don’t tell them Mom and Dad walk with their hands out like acrobats to get to their room.”

“How to Run for Local Office While Building a Community out of Nothing” by Anton Solomonik

“‘Well, if you want someone to run in the primary, I’m your man!’ he exclaimed. ‘A man with no proper sense of himself—a man with nothing inside, who could therefore be all things to all people. Ahahahaha.’ He was moved to laughter by his own eloquence, by what he felt to be the truth and the transformative power of what he was saying, to the one person who could get it.”

"The Daniels: Part Two" by Matthew Frye Castillo

“[The Daniels] work is vital because they each add a necessary extension to what it means to be human. And when grouped together, The Daniels offer a clear retort to that well-intentioned if ill-informed statement: ‘A lot of people of color don’t know their family history.’ Ultimately, people of color do know their families, especially if we continue to find and share the writers who make us come alive.”

"What I Eat in a Day" by Nicole Zhu

“This isn’t some soft, sad Subway sandwich. The bread has integrity and the filling is the consistency of the most robust tuna salad Susie has ever seen, rich from the ratio of mayo but counterbalanced by the crunch of blitzed banana peppers. It tastes like a late night snack and lazy lunch all wrapped into one.”