Smith spoke to the class of 2016, reminding graduates “we grow most as artists and as people when there’s something far off and possibly unattainable in our sights.”

On Outside Magazine, Frazier bemoans the "false piety" of a "proud, powerful cliché": nature as cathedral. 

In literary journal H_NGM_N, McCrae’s narrator laments, “I hide     yet I’m afraid     I’ll be acknowledged / And still I won’t be seen.”

“He said   America would never be/ A place where we could   live together not at/ Least in my lifetime,” laments McCrae’s narrator in a new work about race on Poets.org.

On The Nation, Pollitt delves into the supposed link between class and abortion, explaining that, “when it comes to motherhood, money isn’t everything.”

In The Threepenny Review, Thompson writes of crushes, summer, and jazz music, three phenomena that inspire “a focus on the feeling itself rather than on where it might lead.”

On literary podcast WritersCast, Chris Offutt reflects on his childhood perception of his dad’s career in erotic writing, and how his father’s work has impacted his own identity as a writer.

In The Washington Post, Early dissects the activism, self-consciousness, and fierce competitiveness of Muhammad Ali, “one of our country’s most compelling, sincere and important dissidents.”

On The Nervous Breakdown, Brown muses on a place and time where men “thought they could/ Own the dirt they were/ Bound to.”

Since 2001, over 2600 people have died trying to cross from Mexico into Arizona. On The Intercept, Alarcón creates a visualization to show readers where they perished.