Children’s Books Missed These Immigrant Stories. So Students Wrote Them. (NYTimes)

Greatness surrounds Melissa Cabrera when she attends classes at Bronx Community College. That should not be surprising, because the campus is home to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, where busts of scientists, scholars and statesmen, among others, line a grand colonnade that wraps around Gould Memorial Library, an architectural treasure designed by Stanford White.

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Jay-Z Embraces the Feminine--and So Much More--on Astounding 4:44

It’s a foolhardy attempt to try and nail down any lyrics-driven album in a single set of bars, especially one authored by a rapper of Jay-Z’s legendary, layered dexterity. But early on in the confessional “4:44,” the rapper born Shawn Carter states: “I apologize, often womanize/Took for my child to be born to see through a woman’s eyes/Took me these natural twins to believe in miracles/Took me too long for this song/I don’t deserve you.” The dual facts that a truly soul-searching statement from such a titan of rap has been long forthcoming and that he now better understands both his feminine side and the myths of masculinity are two of the multiple animating elements at work on the rapper’s shockingly good thirteenth studio album, 4:44.

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Whitney Biennial Review

Biennials are a strange thing by their nature. Meant to represent the cream of the artistic crop, these biannual events offer an implicit promise for both artistic excellence (however one chooses to define that these days) and sharp social commentary. In this way the art displayed at a biennial serves a dual purpose: to assure highbrow connoisseurs that quality fine art is still being produced, and at the same time to reflect the zeitgeist. This zeitgeist does not belong to the rarified air of the New York art world, however, or the downtown scenesters sipping wine out of plastic cups in the antiseptic spaces of Chelsea art galleries. The zeitgeist is messy. It consists of violent video games, mass shootings, mind-boggling inequality, opiate addiction, racial tension, social media, and a consumer economy based on cheap labor, disposable products, and omnipresent advertising. In other words, it is about as far from 19th century French impressionism as one could possibly get.

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Don’t Tell Me Your Childhood Was Not A Minefield: A review of Thaddeus Rutkowski’s Guess and Check (Philadelphia Stories)

An effective technique in poetry is to guide the reader on a journey that feels like you’re discovering together as opposed to resorting to a heavy-handed didactic approach. Guess and Check is not a collection of poetry, however, Rutkowski employs this tactic as we follow his protagonist on life’s obstacle-ridden path

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Word Anthology Second Printing!

Hooray for Love! Our second printing of WORD: An Anthology by A Gathering of the Tribes has been ordered and are now available for purchase. Click on the link below! Meanwhile, check out this video of our April 1st Release party brought to you by the fine filmmakers at Neighborhood Slice Productions. 

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Review of Ronit and Jamil

I turn fifty this year—a distinction I share with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the famed Summer of Love… and the Six Day War that brought victory to the state of Israel and began the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights that continues down to this day.

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The Path

After two and a half years, a Gathering of the Tribes is proud to announce its Anthology of 50 poets and 50 artists called WORD, has been released into the world. And due to popular demand, Tribes is in the process in doing a second printing of the above.

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NewsChavisa Woods