The June 2024 issue of About Place explores the concept of “west.” West has always been more than mere direction, a setting sun, evening. The term invokes a fraught mythology of wilderness and conquest, of destiny and riches, of jackrabbit homesteads and romantic distances, of cowboys and bears. These symbols have long dominated our histories of these lands, centering whiteness and masculinity in rugged, difficult terrain. But the West has always been strange, full of contradictions, queer. “Strange Wests” conceives of the West beyond its conventional, colonialized framework. What happens when the dam breaks, when waters flow along their pre-colonial course and stewardship is returned to the original caretakers of the land?

[Cover artwork Dreams Collage by Irina Tall Novikova.]

About Place Journal editors invite readers to their December 2022 issue themed “Center of Gravity” with these comments: “Justice is the center of gravity and resistance is how we get there. While the fight for social justice, reproductive rights, and the environment has been an ongoing struggle, the present moment demands an even more urgent response to these grievous times. As James Baldwin reminds us, ‘the role of the artist…is to illuminate that darkness [and] to make the world a more human dwelling place.’ In this light, the Center of Gravity issue explores poetry, prose and visual art that articulate the possibilities of resistance and envision worlds in which justice is a reality.” Contributors include Natiq Jalil, Gerburg Garmann, Michele Reese, Alison Palmer, Helen Stevens Chinitz, Joe Milazzo, Cheryl Byler Keeler, Jeremy Paden, Cristina Correa, Hannah Dierdorff, Lisa Kwong, Mary Newell, Joanne Diaz & Jason Reblando, H. E. Riddleton, Petra Kuppers, Akua Lezli Hope, Ingrid Wendt, Allison Cummings, Carla S. Schick, Joseph Ross, Evelyn Reilly, Julie Runacres, Ariel Resnikoff, Allison Cobb, Mariana Mcdonald, Cassandra Rockwood Ghanem, Gail Folkins, Gerburg Garmann, Jorge Losoya, Bunny McFadden, RBD, Mary Edna Fraser, and Jack Bordnick.

In the Preface to the May 2022 issue of online About Place, Editor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke comments on the theme, “‘Navigations: A Place for Peace,’ the Spring 2022 edition of About Place Journal, and a special extended folio & related blogs encourages space for soulful solace and bold action. In navigating preservation, protection, reclamation and restoration of traditional knowledges for the sake of our planet in peril and all of its living counterparts, we were thrilled to receive works deeply attending to the remarkable nature of living within continual, revived and reclaimed pathways of knowing delivering such careful consideration and indomitable strength – endurance for the long-haul.” The issue features works from some one-hundred contributors in thematic groupings: Flourishing, Pathways, Gratitude, Reckonings, and Factual State / Future State.