“Late Bloomer,” 2023. Handwoven cotton, wool, acrylic (21 parts total). 90 x 138.5 inches, Paolo Arao. (Photo: Cary Whittier)
From the Current Issue
We are all experts in risk assessment now
silent glittery bursts peaking / above runway fences and then, / from the air, dotting the darkness
A Poet Asks a Visual Artist: Paolo Arao
I love the similarities between the piano and the loom. Both devices are creative instruments that rely on the touch of the hand and movement of the body to function.
Old Men Playing Golf With Their Wives Inside Them
Their story: does not have a plot because old men’s lives do not have plots, just one colon after another with frequent asides.
Terms and Conditions of Being Indigenous™
You agree that any deviation from the public’s expectation of “Indian” may result in interrogation, fetishization, erasure, death, or all of the above.
We Built This City: A Broken Hyangga1
it was love for my sons that killed me
Birds in the Dark
When I was in college, a bird built her nest outside my dorm.
About Shenandoah
Reading through the perspective of another person, persona, or character is one of the ways we practice empathy, expand our understanding of the world, and experience new levels of awareness.
Recent Blog posts from the Peak
Shenandoah Interviews Writer and Political Speechwriter Sarah Gouda
Sarah Gouda is a writer and speechwriter who hails from Ohio. She is currently the Deputy Director of Speechwriting for Zohran Mamdani in the Office for the Mayor for New York City. In the past, she served as the speechwriter to the president at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and as the Deputy Director of Speechwriting to Vice President Kamala Harris in the Biden-Harris administration. Outside of political speeches, Gouda has written for Teen Vogue, Rookie, Reductress, Gothamist, Splinter, Barrelhouse, Chicago Sun-Times, Epiphany, and Shenandoah. She received an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote fellow. Shenandoah’s special features editor, Nadeen Kharputly, interviewed the writer to discuss how she approaches craft in both her creative writing and in her day-to-day work as a political speechwriter.
Water Tower
In his multimedia epistolary project, Joel Holub shares a watercolor painting and its handwritten companion letter originally sent in 2010.
The Ghazal’s Triptych Tongue
Blog Editor Chase Isbell interviews Shenandoah contributor Ali Choudhary about his poem “Ghazal in which I am read aloud until I tremble,” a ghazal about religion, desire, and genocide.