I used to be a huge writer and reader when I was growing up and still really enjoy writing today. As a kid, I didn’t really understand how much work is done between an author writing a book and a reader purchasing it at a bookstore, and it’s always been a little curiosity of mine. Read more →

By Bev Rivero | Beacon has a lot of reasons to celebrate this spring! Several authors received awards recognition for their books, so let’s recap. Last week, the 2025 Pulitzer Prizes were announced, and Gayl Jones’s “The Unicorn Woman” was a finalist for Fiction in a livestreamed ceremony. Readers were quick to note that there were four finalists this year. Read more →

By Christian Coleman | The start of the forty-seventh administration in the White House sounded off the red alert for mothers of all stripes in the US. They were already on high alert during the years leading up to the 2024 elections. For the next four years, mothers will be Mothering with a capital M against this administration’s wrecking-ball rampage. Mothers making sure people who can become pregnant get the abortion care they need. Mothers who take in gay and trans children who’ve been rejected by their blood relatives. Read more →

By Michael Andor Brodeur | These days there’s a guru waiting around every corner for young men to come clicking. They cover fitness, diet and nutrition, dating, politics, philosophy (however rudimentary), and, their favorite topic, masculinity—its dire state, its necessary preservation, its unlockable secrets, its bestowal of dominion. The difference between the manfluencers of old and today’s glut is that, because white heterosexual men now perceive themselves as having (so generously!) ceded physical, financial, professional, and cultural ground to women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks (i.e., everyone else), they’re doubling down on their occupation of virtual space. Unlike any other comparable Internet niche or eddy, the manosphere carries itself like it owns the place. Read more →

A Q&A with Alisha Dietzman | I mentor a small group of incredible students from my last poetry workshop who wanted to continue to meet. Most recently, I worked as an adjunct at a small Quaker liberal arts college in rural Oregon where I taught freshman composition and intermediate poetry. Over the years, I’ve taught/tutored in a wide variety of environments and to a wide variety of students. Read more →