Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts

19/06/2025

Happy Juneteenth!

11/06/2025

Come on, New York Times, that was too easy!! 😉

11/06/2025

Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts founder & longtime editor Dr. Charles H. Rowell was honored with this year's PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing

Executive editor Kyla Kupferstein Torres accepted on his behalf at the May 8 ceremony

Read all about it at the Newsroom Blog: https://tinyurl.com/muaby8bt

16/05/2025

Our founder, Dr. Charles H. Rowell, was recently honored with PEN America's Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing! 🎉🎉 Our executive editor, Kyla Kupferstein Torres, was there to accept the award on Dr. Rowell’s behalf.

Congratulations also to Callaloo contributor X Man, who received the PEN/Voelcker Award for his poetry collection Load in Nine Times!

Pictured are Kyla, Janice Harrington, Patricia Smith, Marie Brown, Ricky Day, and Frank X Walker.

30/04/2025

Do you have strong web & social media experience? 💻📱 Are you interested in supporting Black literature, arts, & culture? Apply for our Web & Social Media Coordinator position at https://bit.ly/3SiNmMY

26/04/2025

How wonderful of CALLALOO issue 42.4 contributor Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond to send these photos from The Library of Africa and the African Diaspora in Accra, Ghana, where many back issues of CALLALOO are archived in the Professor lan H. Munro collection!

Pictured are Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond and Seth Avusuglo, one of the librarians.

Find more information on the Professor Munro collection at https://LOATAD.org/library

10/04/2025

We loved to see Amy Sherald's "Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance)" on the March 24 cover of The New Yorker! It also appeared on the cover of Callaloo's Vol. 39.2 in 2016!

Do you have a favorite Callaloo cover? Take a shot and share it with us!

25/03/2025

We're thrilled to announce our new partnership with Brown University!

18/03/2025

📣📣Interested in working with Callaloo? We're looking for a full-time managing editor. Might that be you? Applicants are encouraged to apply by March 24th.

Find complete details here:

Job Description: Callaloo is a literary journal dedicated to the creative and critical exploration of the African Diaspora. For almost fifty years, Callaloo has been one of the most essential and continuously published journals of African Diaspora arts and letters. The journal publishes original wor...

10/03/2025

Congratulations to all the winners of The American Academy of Arts & Letters awards, including Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop alum Jamel Brinkley (Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award) and Callaloo contributors Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Arts & Letters Award) and J***y Pitts (E. M. Forster Award)!

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of the country's 300 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers.

20/02/2025

Congratulations to CALLALOO contributor Torli Bush! Torli's work appears in our special double issue on Black Appalachia, guest-edited by Crystal Wilkinson. Order the issue at https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/cart/for-sale?oc=21

🔦MEET TORLI BUSH & THEIR BOOK “REQUIEM FOR A REDBIRD” | A 2025 WCoNA BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST

"Requiem for a Redbird" is a collection meant to take its readers through five distinct yet interwoven sections; it's a book, in Bush's own words, that is unapologetically both Appalachian and Black. Bush came to sort their work into poems whose main themes begin in Appalachia, end by reflecting on the country as a whole, and thread throughout the complexities of death, intimacy, politics, and faith.

According to the author, it is ultimately meant to be a work of joy and hope that points beyond itself: one that subverts the stereotypes of their home region, speaks truth to power, and seeks an open table of reconciliation. Appalachians of every background, minority communities, communities of faith, and anyone disillusioned with our country's political system can find something good, true, and beautiful in this book.

WHAT THE BOOK OF THE YEAR COMMITTEE THINKS
✒️“The work is ambitious in tackling the tensions around race, parentage, sexuality, and religion.”
✒️“The writing is evocative.”
✒️“The book romanced me.”
✒️“Bush stands out as a distinctive voice and represents the evolving spirit of our region. Like Nikki Giovanni blurbed, it made me proud.”
✒️“We need more voices like Torli Bush in our canon.”

ABOUT TORLI BUSH
Torli Bush is a poet from Webster Springs, WV. They hold a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from West Virginia University and a MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Torli is currently a poetry editor for Heartwood Literary Magazine and their work has appeared in K'in Literary Journal, Appalachian Lit, Callaloo, In the Shadow of the Mic: Three Decades of Slam Poetry in Pittsburgh, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers - Ann Pancake Volume XVI. A significant portion of their first collection Requiem for A Redbird, originally entitled American Psalms, was also named as a finalist in the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize from the University of Pittsburgh.

Torli Bush

08/02/2025

Our Executive Editor, Kyla Kupferstein Torres, was interviewed for the latest episode of the Johns Hopkins University Press Podcast! Available now wherever you get your podcasts and at https://bit.ly/40PNMyz

To accompany the podcast, Kyla and JHUP pulled together an epic reading list spanning CALLALOO's decades, featuring poetry, prose, and interviews with Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Rita Dove, Edwidge Danticat, Percival Everett, and many more—most free on Project MUSE through Feb 29!: https://bit.ly/4gC3oeG