Guernica’s specials offer a close, and unique, look at topics that we believe are important, timely, or just plain compelling. A deeper extension of our usual explorations into arts and politics, this series aims to broaden the range of voices participating in conversations that matter.

Anthologia

Guernica’s gathering of poems by a single poet

Dirt

On Dirt, a special issue of Guernica

Memory Loss

A mini series, co-published with Urban Omnibus, that explores sites of public and private remembrance in New York City.

Fashion in Isolation

Considering the sentimental, contradictory, and inescapable relationships we have with what we wear.

PEN World Voices

At a panel at this year’s PEN America World Voices Festival, five poets discuss the pain and self-actualization in the poems of Komunyakaa.

Climate Fiction

We've known for years about climate change, but only 54% of Americans think it's a "serious issue." That's why, says guest fiction editor Amy Brady, we need to read climate fiction.

Rewriting the West

Reconsidering the origin stories and mythologies of Los Angeles, Texas, Arizona, the Alamo, and a family.
Noise Runs documentary still

SIMA docs

Our new documentary series, presented by SIMA.

Readpolitik

Reviewing literature through the lens of politics.

Deserts

To make a story from the desert is not unlike the work of the agave. Something must transform.

Female Fighters

In partnership with the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative at the City College of New York.

The Kiss

On perhaps the most intimate of human interactions.

Freedom of Expression: The Gray Areas

On the forces that obstruct expression in an age when writers, activists, and others find themselves visibly, violently, and systematically surveilled and silenced, and where—whether geographically or intellectually, in memory or in cyberspace—we might actually be free. Guernica and Free Word in association with Article 19 and English PEN.

The American South: On the Map and in the Mind

On the landscape of the South, at turns surprising and familiar, at once a geographical distinction and a bright spot in the imagination, where burden vies with birthright, and where ignorance and renaissance exist side by side.

Class in America: The Fault Lines

On yesterday’s legacy, today’s money, and class lines as fault lines—politically fraught and personally subjective, actual and imagined.

American Empires: Power and Its Discontents

On the vast cultural, economic, and political space of America, where there is the government and also what governs us: family, preachers, landlords, money, or that thing you feel in the absence of money, corporations, even art.

Religion in America: Gods and Devils

On the continued tendency in America to define belief by its absence, myriad approaches to spiritual life, and lasting expressions of faith, be it through dogged observance, syncretism, resistance, or renewal.

The Boundaries of Gender

On constructing and reconstructing sexuality, upending and transgressing the constricting binaries of gender, and the body as the first and most foundational means of relation.

The Boundaries of Taste

On that nebulous space between love and what we think we love, primal pleasure and learned appreciation, gut revulsion and reasoned dismissal, and taste as performance and a projection of our selves into the world.

The Boundaries of Nature

On the natural world: wondrous, ineffable, and indifferent to us, adhering to its own laws even as we behold it with awe or fear, even as we seek to understand it through physics and art, even as we impose policies of plunder or protection.

The Boundaries of Nations

On who we are and where we come from, what national and personal identity might mean in this uprooted, transient era when home can be defined by the clothes on your back and the borders you can’t cross.

The Future of Language

On language as a wellspring of memory and shared knowledge, and a rubric by which we measure difference—between races, between species, between subjectivities.

The Future of Cities

On cities grimed by human hands—by pollution and greed, by corruption and terrorism, by neglect and artificiality, by colonization and apartheid and war—and places of hope, with humanism as their foundation.