The Adroit Journal News Updates

The day I started writing this essay, hundreds of U.S. Marines arrived in downtown Los Angeles, about ten miles from my home in Pasadena. They joined the 2,000 National Guardsmen already in the city. Both the Marines and the National Guard had been tasked with protecting federal property and personnel.… Read more »

Ocean Vuong’s latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a bold and remarkable novel that captures the hopes and disillusionments of people living in today’s America. The story begins in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, with the unlikely encounter between the young Vietnamese-American man, Hai, who is planning… Read more »

When I decided to pursue an MFA in poetry, I applied widely and foolishly, and somehow accepted an offer from NYU—an offer I quickly questioned in my first workshop where, when introducing ourselves, I learned I was sitting next to a 23-year-old phenom already published in The New Yorker. Fuck,… Read more »

Before I ever stepped to a mic or submitted a poem to a press, music filled my ears, my head, my neighborhood, the kitchen in our household, the whining cassette player beneath my bed sheets. When I discovered poetry, I discovered it through music. My mother had a stack of… Read more »

Hedgie Choi is the author of the poetry collection Salvage, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, and her MFA in fiction from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. She lives in Chicago.  *** Hedgie… Read more »

Handsome men, my Ptown cottage guests were all of Steve’s generation, in their fifties and sixties. I was in my late-thirties. They wanted to know what my parents had thought of me spending so much time with an older man when I was a teen. “Was your mom a fag… Read more »

Sarah Yahm is a freelance writer, radio producer and educator who has been published in Slate, The Bellevue Literary Review, and NPR and its affiliates. Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation was awarded the 2024 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. The book was published in May.  *** When an author writes honestly… Read more »