United States
Raia Small is a writer living in northern California. Her work has recently been published in Midnight Sun, Peste, Copwatch.Media, Kaleidoscoped, and Make/shift. She was a 2019 Interdisciplinary Writers' Lab fellow at the Kearny Street Workshop, a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop participant, and is a 2023 Periplus Fellow. She has worked as a barista, social studies tutor, photocopy shop employee, babysitter, and community organizer. Her writing engages affective labor, illness, Marxism, feminism, aesthetics, and feelings.
On October 21st, a Kern County jury found Wendy Howard not guilty of first and second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for shooting her abusive ex-partner Kelly Pitts in 2019. Despite a campaign by Kern County District Attorney Cynthia Zimmer to paint Howard as a violent woman, the prosecution failed to prove that Howard shot Pitts out of aggression and not self-defense.
Should you read Strangers to Ourselves before you die, or should you die first? By Raia Small In Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us , Rachel Aviv refrains from polemicizing on the causes of mental illness.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the most globally disruptive health crisis in at least 100 years. The official death toll is 6.5 million people worldwide; the World Health Organization estimates the actual death toll to be at least 15 million .
Four hundred goats came to the hillside near my house to eat the grass before it could burn, and the walk to visit them each day became my pilgrimage. Their gentle faces, their constant chewing. They climbed on top of each other to reach delicious scraps of bark.
my interview with the brilliant @bighedva is out in the latest issue of @makeshiftmag!pic.twitter.com/F8DytnSKSO
In the Kitchens of the Metropolis: An Interview with Silvia Federici, July 2015 (just a year late)pic.twitter.com/0QWVgSwut2
On the west side near the bus terminal on the overpass overlooking a sea of retired train cars, tucked in rail to rail. They were captives at the station, a soft spray of Hudson River water slowly rusting their bodies. It's an imperceptible shift, from motion to stillness, but the turnover will wreck your brakes.
and all we can do is dig. - Jonathan Galassi Remember when we dug up the rusted carburetor in the garden? The torn rubber tire tread, the dirt-encrusted gears? Planting squash and basil, we ate the lead-steeped tomatoes stubbornly all summer. That's what this kind of excavation feels like: junkyard scraps where I should be planting.