08/08/2026
What does it take to stay fully human in a world relentlessly pressuring us to become less?
Issue 31 of Speak the Sojourner refuses to look away from that question.
We're living through a moment that demands resilience but rarely grants rest. That demands courage while making tenderness feel like a liability. That asks us to hope even when the evidence for hope is thin on the ground.
And yet, people keep loving, using their voices, and imagining a world far braver than the one that shaped them.
In this issue, NaKeesa Frazier-Jennings cuts straight into the tension between strength and softness. Alex Garland wrestles with what millennials inherited, and what carrying it taught them. John Aaron writes unflinchingly through love, memory, and loss. And Tiana Cole names the repeated silencing of Black life, insisting that empathy and courage can still survive it.
Together, their work makes one thing clear: becoming human is unfinished work, always.
It demands we carry grief without letting it consume us. And that we remember: in a fractured season, our stories remain among the sharpest tools we have to remake the world.
Issue 31 of Speak the Sojourner is available now! Subscribe at get lit(erature) here: https://speak-the-sojourner.ghost.io/
