About Place Journal October 2024 issue is titled, Shaping Destiny: Election Season, Before, During and After, with contents that respond to the realities of the most important election of our times. Democracy or dictatorship: these are the stakes. Through poetry, prose, and graphics, Shaping Destiny explores the current national and international situation, focusing on ways in which social and environmental justice are created or destroyed, and relating these—as is the focus of the Black Earth Institute—to matters of the spirit. Many rights have been lost or are threatened, as is the integrity of the election. It is our hope that Shaping Destiny will inspire you to do the work that is in front of all of us.

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As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Maybe now, in this time when the myth of human exceptionalism has proven illusory, we will listen to intelligences other than our own, to kin. To get there, we may all need a new language to help us honor and be open to the beings who will teach us.” . . . In this issue of About Place, co-editors Nickole Brown and Erin Coughlin Hollowell gather work galvanized by this challenge. The result is an extraordinary chorus of writers and artists, each attempting to decenter our human story to speak not just about plants and animals but for them, bringing awareness to life beyond our human realm. Cover art by Rebecca Clark.

About Place Journal is published by the Black Earth Institute with each issue having a specific theme and edited by one of their BEI Fellows. The July 2023 issue is themed ‘On Rivers.’ Rivers are deep sources of connection and memory, holding very different meanings for different communities, and this issue seeks to honor the many types of relationships we have with rivers. Coeditors Teresa Dzieglewicz and Laura-Gray Street, with consulting editors Lucien Darjeun Meadows and Irene Vázquez, have curated a wide range of prose, poetry, visual art, and hybrid and multi-modal work, creating a collective view on rivers that is expansive and surprising.

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