Author: JohnValbyNation

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This July, the World Health Organization declared that an outbreak of Ebola in the provinces of Ituri and North-Kivu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, was a “public health emergency of international concern.” This particular strain of the virus, which first appeared in the region in 2018 and hasn’t been given a formal…

My mourning mind, compromised and searching for coincidence, processes the age Toni Morrison was when she died, eighty-eight, as two infinity signs, straightened and snatched right-side up. If we are Morrison-fearing, as some others are with their icons, well, we were socialized by her novels. What an experience, to be mothered on one plane by…

On Monday, Toni Morrison died in New York. Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children in a working-class family. She would, in time, become a renowned editor, fostering a generation of black writers. Then she took to the page herself, producing a body of work—novels, criticism, essays, speeches—that would…

Whenever I think about Toni Morrison, I think about my favorite teacher, Deborah Stanford, a black woman who, when I was in high school, helped me to understand that to read seriously was a discipline and a privilege, and that an author who helps us to do it is a kind of hero. Her brand…

This is the sixth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from 2017 and 2018, here. The first one takes you back to his place, on Mandell. He asks you to top him and you do and that’s it. The second one chats you…

Last year, I had a strange dream. My father and I were wading in an industrial canal, reminiscent of a subway, as thousands of hatchery-raised fish were being released into it. The fish crowded, slimy, around our legs, and I knew (in the way that one knows in a dream) that they thought, as they…

Texting About Something Other Than Making Plans: Do you think we’re ready to start sending each other memes? Because I saw one of a cat, I remembered that you have a plant, and I was, like, “Whoa, another living thing”—same color, too. (You should water your plant.) Admitting You Didn’t Watch His/Her TV Recommendation: Because…

In August, 2011, I received a letter with a return address that read “Supreme Court of the United States.” There was no name on the envelope. I tore it open, wondering whether I was somehow being summoned for jury duty. Inside was a two-page letter from John Paul Stevens. He had recently read my book…

On Monday afternoon, following the news that President Trump would be visiting El Paso after a mass shooting that killed twenty-two people, a local immigrant-advocacy group began circulating a letter to the President asking him to stay away. The open letter, principally authored by the Border Network for Human Rights, stated that Patrick Crusius, the…