Hi friends,

Whenever people ask me where I've been, it's been a little difficult to answer completely. The easy answer has to do with time and obligations, working in an office full-time, two weeks left until BookNet Fest, any other number of things that fill my hours. The more complicated answer takes a few pit stops through mental health and physical exhaustion, and the kind of fatigue borne of just existing in this moment.

I have been staring at the news this week with that particular kind of exhaustion, the kind where you keep refreshing because you can't quite believe what you're reading, but then you also believe it immediately, because of course.

The Supreme Court recently handed down a 6-3 decision that effectively guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that for decades has been the primary legal protection against the deliberate dilution of minority voting power. The ruling struck down Louisiana's majority-Black congressional district. Louisiana is now weighing whether to postpone its May 16th primaries entirely so the legislature can redraw maps that will, by design, make Black voters matter less. It is, in essence, politicians choosing their voters and the map deciding who gets to count.

If you know any American history, you know that this is an old story, not a new one. The Voting Rights Act was signed in 1965 because the century after the Civil War had been a sustained, even rather creative effort to ensure that the promise of Black citizenship and Black political power was never actually kept. Every time a door opened, someone built a wall a little further back: literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, redrawing lines, moving polling places, grandfather clauses again. The VRA was an attempt to stop that.

Is there anything more tragic than the way history repeats itself? Especially since what it really shows us is that it takes so much effort to disenfranchise people. It requires energy, intention, and legal architecture to ensure that some people's voices are a problem to be managed rather than a right to be protected. Someone is always doing that work.

And someone has always had to do the harder work of insisting, in the face of it, on their own existence. Arguably, that work existed, in no small part, through stories, through histories, through art, and the communities built around those things.

I've spent a long time arguing across my content and Internet spaces that literature is not separate from the world we live in—that what gets published, whose lives are reflected on the page, who gets to be the complicated protagonist of their own story, these are not neutral choices. Because, of course, while readers at large may not always understand this, censorship understands this. Book bans understand this. And fascism understands this, ensuring that the first line of attack starts with limiting access to works, histories, and voices.

I'm by no means insinuating that literature fixes gerrymandering, but I was brought back here in the face of that bone-deep exhaustion because literature is one of the ways people have always survived the active effort to make them smaller.

That's what I'm thinking about this week, and it's a good reminder that this is a big part of why I do the work I do. A good reminder because it can be difficult to believe in the small things in the face of such evil, to feel like the thing you're doing could possibly matter when the thing being done is this large and focused and old.

No one wants to hear, "check your voter registration" or "find your local voting rights organization." No one wants to pay even closer attention to the news, to what's being redrawn and who it benefits. No one wants to hear that our art, our stories, and our histories become even more important when our voices are being systemically silenced.

But I'm afraid that's all I really have for you today, because those things still matter.

If you want to support my work: Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes comes out June 9th, and it is one of the books I am most proud to be putting into the world. It is set in 1920s Mississippi, and it is about community and power and who bears the weight so that everyone else can feel light. Aardvark chose it for their April box, but it will still be available while supplies last as an add-on in future months. Otherwise, you can pre-order the paperback version wherever books are sold.

Thank you, friends. I'm still here. So are the Mareas stories.

♥️

Marines