June
2022
Haviah, so MIGHTY
Last month, Canadian artist Haviah Mighty became the first woman to win Rap Album of the Year in the (52-year) history of the Juno Awards.
Six
Women, & Nonbinary Artists of Color.
Poets, Artists, Musicians, & Writers.
Welcome to the Hennepin Review.
Shareen K. Murayama
is a Japanese American, Okinawan American poet and educator. Her debut poetry collection, Housebreak, is out this summer.
Read her stunning work of flash fiction:
Foreign Objects
One night, D.A.'s biking in the street, drinking with friends, the wind carting cuss words and laughter like shattered glass, and the next, he’s washing shit from his grandmother’s underwear, hanging it on the laundry line, not making eye contact with any of us. On nights with no breeze, D.A.’s bare chest reflects the light from the lamp post.
— SHAREEN K. MURAYAMA
Baabaa’s jaws wouldn’t move fast enough, like water at high boil. Couldn’t say illegitimate. Sometimes there’s no substitute for words we’d worry over, flipping over its textures, stretching definitions to the width of the night.
Lal Batman
〰️
Lal Batman 〰️
Lal Batman is a Turkish artist
on the rise
NAILAH MATHEWS, mentee of Friday Black author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, shares their new poem:
ZIRA
… with green foam in my throat
my daughter of the glittering jungle crowning
conceived when lightening carved fossils in the sky
my child of ancient unmarveled bone…
— Nailah Mathews
Erica Lee Smith
THE WOMAN WHO ADOPTED ME MAKES DINNER
It looks great, I tell her. Janelle’s face contorts but does not cry. The fish will probably not be fully cooked on the inside, the way most of what Janelle makes is either under or overdone, but tonight, I will eat it and say nothing.
There’s always one kid who has to yank his eyelids into slits, who has to say something like ching chang chong or pork flied lice, and then cackle at what an unfettered genius he is. When it happens, I am deeply embarrassed for the both of us, but those boys never look ashamed. What do they know that I don’t?
— Erica Lee Smith
Minnesotan Writer Debra Stone recalls:
“When I was ten, Grandpa told me he broke horses and mules and drove cattle to the stockyards in Omaha, like the TV show Rawhide. I was astonished. He was a Black cowboy.”
In GRANDPA JOE Debra shares part of her wondrous, untold history.
“Why’d they leave?”
“It was time to do better, just like you’ll do better one day.”
The peanuts salt at Zenobia’s lips. She swallows; watches Grandpa bring the bottle of Grain Belt beer to his mouth. His large hands are gnarled; knuckles prominent.
— Debra Stone
-
Lal Batman
ART
-
Nailah Mathews
POETRY
-
Haviah Mighty
MUSIC
-
Shareen Murayama
FLASH FICTION
-
Erica Lee Smith
FICTION
-
Debra Stone
CREATIVE NON-FICTION
