Catawba Publishing

In his poem entitled “Frederick Douglass”, Robert Hayden writes: “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful/ and terrible thing, needful to man as air…” The poets and writers in this anthology understand that the making of art and pursuit of knowledge are also fundamental drives often intertwined with the promise of freedom, that writing can be as vital as respiration, and that scholarship can trace the breathing of generations. By hearing the breaths in our midst, and those from our past, we come to understand the scope of our community—how those before us made our lives possible, and how we can sustain those to follow. The will expressed by these writers to bring forth new vision is intrinsically linked to and emblematic of the community’s own possible transformation and health.