11+ hour, 20+ min ago  (1354+ words) As Kick treads water and struggles to stay buoyant, his mind ranges freely—revisiting his childhood in Nebraska, parsing the complicated history of his nuclear family, and reckoning with the quieter, stealthier forces that have shaped his life. In our…...

11+ hour, 57+ min ago  (474+ words) Roxane Gay's writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney's, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for…...

14+ hour, 48+ min ago  (59+ words) Sean Glatch is a queer poet, storyteller, and educator in New York City. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Sean currently runs the creative writing school Writers.com and the forthcoming card game…...

4+ day, 15+ hour ago  (552+ words) The Rumpus Form as Historical Memory: On D. M. Aderibigbe’s “82nd Division” The best Nigerian poetry of the past couple decades is anything but short. More than a decade ago, the duo of Tade Ipadeola and Dami Ajayi enchanted us, and they continue…...

5+ day, 12+ hour ago  (73+ words) Gemma Cooper-Novack’s poetry collection We Might As Well Be Underwater (Unsolicited Press, 2017) was a finalist for the CNY Book Award. She’s published chapbooks with Warren Tales and The Head & the Hand. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in more than…...

5+ day, 15+ hour ago  (138+ words) Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. They showed their…...

5+ day, 17+ hour ago  (1357+ words) © 2026, The Rumpus. I met Sikelianos on Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, haunt of another sort of lineage—this one attached to ecopoetics, experimental poetry, the Outrider tradition, and the Naropa school, of which Sikelianos was a student. To speak with her is…...

6+ day, 14+ hour ago  (1558+ words) I was delighted to speak with Emily Rapp Black over Zoom about theology and superheroes, the difference between belief in God and belief in the world, and why your affliction might be your greatest strength. The Rumpus: The title I…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago  (73+ words) Freedom. What a concept. Free of pain and most importantly, other people’s intolerance, their hatred and their violence. As Nina Simone once so famously said: “Freedom is living without fear.” I cannot better such a description. That’s about as clear…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago  (767+ words) “God, I won’t be your sacred chicken if it means I have to fight, but I will fight. / I already scan the perimeter. / Testosterone, yes, I take it. Which is not the same as fighting. / The shape you see has…...