By Anh Nguyen Gray
My mother would be in her early 70s now if she were still alive. But, instead, she died five years ago. It's a bit painful when I see older Asian women the age she would be today. They remind me of her; more so, they remind me of her absence. There's rarely a day that goes by that I don't think about my mother. Lately, I think of her more than usual, but the twinge of pain is different. Stories about violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have made me more reflective about my family.

By Harrison Blackman
Paul Revere Williams (1894–1980) may have been one of the most prolific architects in 20th century Los Angeles, but as the story goes, he often found the need to make his prospective clients more comfortable. So that his clients might sit across from him at his desk, the architect learned to sketch upside down.

By Dr. Elwood Schmidt
Each evening as I sit at the kitchen table my view is of the Virginia Range. For 26 years I have watched the light and shadows on the ridges and gullies of the Virginias sharpen, soften, then fade into darkness and change with the seasons.

By Kimberly Roberts
Every photograph is a contradiction: while photography captures an exact moment in time, that moment is always subject to interpretation. Images are neither static nor frozen, but constantly shifting, always dependent on context, difficult to pin down. One way to break through this is to distinguish between two ways of approaching the photograph: to try to reconstruct a photograph in history, to try to unlock its original intent; and to try to understand it through history, to analyze its changing contexts over time.

By Kendra Atleework
Each morning I wake up in a yellow bedroom in a sun-bleached town. My bedroom has three windows: one facing north toward the fairgrounds, toward Highway 6 and the dry Chalfant Valley and Nevada beyond; another facing east toward the White Mountains, ancient and almost bare of trees. The third looks south, toward the giant liquidambar that greets the wind and flails its branches in my yard. Not far beyond, just past the roof of the elementary school, is the room where I was born.

By Heather Korbulic
There’s a stereotype about bureaucrats that I hate. It basically says that they are lethargic, lazy, and unresponsive, and even the term itself, bureaucrat, is used as a pejorative. As someone who has spent 13 years leading and innovating with my fellow bureaucrats in Nevada, I have felt nothing but a persistent and heavy sense of urgency to address the needs of the citizens that I serve. Never once have I felt relaxed or bored.

By Dr. Albert R. Lee
In difficult times it is often challenging to find silver linings in the clouds that surround us. As we entered the summer of 2020, not only were we facing a global pandemic, but we were also confronted with an incident, actually multiple incidents, of police brutality that forced us to grapple with what we had long ignored as a country. In addition, I was providing care for my ailing mother after a major health crisis.

By Luis Soto Jr.
Not everyone was able to experience the outside world every day. Those who did were our essential workers. As they experienced the pandemic firsthand, we were in the dark, living life inside a bubble, watching from windows or from screens. We would look from different points of view captured on camera.

By Caitlin McCarty
Recently, I read an article written in 2010 by Dacher Keltner about human touch. Keltner starts the article writing, “A pat on the back, a caress of the arm—these are every day, incidental gestures that we usually take for granted...” Keltner goes on to express the importance of human touch and how it connects us, how it is “our primary language of compassion, and a primary means for spreading compassion.”

By Heather Lang-Cassera
In the earlier months of the pandemic, I found myself irresistibly drawn to writing pantoums. The second and fourth line of each stanza were repeated as the first and third of the following quatrain. The last line of each poem was the same as the first. At the time, I did not understand my fascination with the form, especially its cyclical spirit, but looking back, my fixation makes sense.

By Shaun T. Griffin
in memoriam, Lucy Bouldin
She was a coyote howling the broken stars from their orbit—
peripatetic, haunted, hunted for being black in a white town.
For most of the night they came, a pack outside her door
to squeal the notes for a librarian in a white town.
What looked like hope lost on a journey to open books—
this diminutive dancer broke with convention in a white town.

By Emilee Wirshing
exit your body
close the doors & light only a solitary candle
you are the ghost in this home
invalid, swollen brain, you see
the impossible curling of ordinary objects
the aura is not an oracle but somewhere

By Ashley “Ms. AyeVee” Vargas
Poetry has always been my safe haven. Handwritten poetry journals filled cover to cover lined many of my bookshelves, but behind my cursive lines I secretly dreamed of seeing my words printed in bold ink on smooth pages.

By Erin Geiger Smith
The 2020 election was, to put it mildly, one for the history books. But with it, its months-long controversies, and a harrowing January attack on the U.S. Capitol behind us, we can take a nice, long break from thinking about voting, right? I regret to inform you that is not the case. The laws that lead to voter suppression, or, in the best case, smoother elections and improved access to the polls, are passed between elections. For new voting laws, 2021 has also turned out to be one for the history books.

By Angela M. Brommel
Brevity is a kind of intimacy. The short poem exists in the spark of a passing moment. It works because it has good emotional shorthand. The writer gives you a glimpse into another world, and you are invested in its story and images because you feel something even if you don’t have or understand all of the details.

By Scott Dickensheets
Pity the historical novelist of the 2070s, ready to embark on a tale set in our times. The very plenitude of meaning-rich incident that tingles her storytelling antennae — a pandemic and a contested election and nationwide protests and an attempted insurrection and climate change events and Ted Cruz’s quarantine beard — will also pose a daunting challenge, as noted by many frazzled 2020 posts on the socials: If this was fiction, it would NOT be believable. There’s too much good stuff demanding inclusion, and we haven’t even gotten to the Cat Lawyer.