Chronic—A Chapbook on Living with Illness, edited by Yvonne Wabai There’s a certain silence that often settles around chronic illness—a quiet that comes not just from pain, but from being disbelieved, misdiagnosed, or forgotten; a […]

While Otieno’s first oath was unintentional, the second time she stood naked in that dim room in Gaitumbi next to her fellow revolutionary dissidents, she meant it. The second time she committed her life and wealth to a struggle against empire and its collaborators—words which could render her a signatory to her own death if she betrayed them—was not a mistake.

A Long House is pleased to announce that  Yvonne Wabai and Sihle Ntuli have been selected as the 2025 Rajat Neogy Editorial Fellows. Wabai and Ntuli are writers and editors who have been doing literary […]

“It is easy to speak about this book purely at the level of what it is about, rather than what it is.”

i’ve watched leaves raining down from their mother tree,
yours was a droplet of salt on our wounds.

In a Nebraska grocery store, packets of corn yellow 
at me from the shelves and I’m back to the planting  
season, when the rains have appeased the land.

everything I am 
is wanting & needing/

every bone, every 
hollow, this image/

is a god fashion-made for you/

But you can see me there.
In the picture of the birds. 
In the church of avian beings. 
Small, colorful, and endangered.

“Titled after Malick Sidibe’s work of the same name, which means “Look at me” in English, I
collect pictures that speak to the pattern of beauty of the Black and/or African woman.”
—Mayowa Oyewale

he insists, we lost the civil war 
because i kept aiming at a god, only i could see
hiding behind a cloud.

how do i tell him that he’s my grandfather 
& i wasn’t born until 28 years after the war?