After a long silence, we’re so excited to share with you our fall/winter edition of The Raven! This year we’ve created a magazine offered both digitally and in print. Flip through below! Come back soon to browse the website for exclusive content, including interviews and personal essays from BAL’s non-fiction writers. We’ll be sharing a series of new work in the next few weeks.
Bronx Academy of Letters is kicking off another great year in writing! This semester we’ve got two Non-Fiction elective classes busting their bums to create some magic on the page. While our newspaper staff is still assembling, in the meantime, meet some of the writers you’ll be hearing from! Bronx Academy of Letters Non-Fiction Writers Profiles! RYAN J. GARY Bio: I guess I’m just a regular kid. It’s rare when I’m not hungry because for some reason my body sweats a lot of calories out. My father is Black and my mom is Puerto Rican. What is the story of your name? My name is commonly used in Ireland but is also quite known here. It means “Little King.” My parents chose the name Ryan because it was hard to find a name that matches with my last name. Also my sister actually chose my middle name and she got it from retired pro basketball player, Michael Jordan. What is your earliest memory? My earliest memory isn’t the best but more traumatic. I was four …
It was the kind of somber day that stopped even the most devoted Christians from going to church, simply because of how tired they felt. Nobody could escape gloominess on a day like this, and yet everyone in the middle car of the two train making it’s way deeper into the Bronx was wide awake that afternoon. Each and every person sat up, alert when the man in the dark coat pulled a gun from his pocket.
She was expecting to see her father walking up the dirt road with a stern but welcoming smile. He, too, had warned her about being in the night alone. It was not her first time out, but it might be her last.
Being catcalled is a very unexpected event that can happen to anyone. A man doesn’t always have to say something to make a woman feel endangered. It could just be the way they looked at somebody.
It’s not that there weren’t real problems: the family experienced rent issues and unemployment. Most of her symptoms showed up as a lack of interest, aches and pains, guilt, tiredness, and loss of energy. Uca was not the type of person who would be upset most of the time. Before having depression she was full of life, charisma, and joy.
One thing about women in media is that they magically disappear around age forty. Apparently, women are not supposed to age, and therefore the media tells older women that they still need to look young. Maybe this is why Grandma cares about her beauty so much.
Eighty-eight years old, Jose was a tall, dark-skinned man with pimples on his face. Glasses covered his dark brown eyes. The sun warmed his cheeks. This is how I imagined my great grandfather before the wheelchair.
Malick is a tall, boney, wide-eyed man in his early thirties with honey brown skin. He wears a tiger striped cloth vest and matching pants. He sits in Port Bouet Airport. Beside him is Sita, his wife, a handicapped dark skin woman with short hair. She is wearing a purple pattern cloth dress. She whispers in his ear, “Pardon! Mon bebe, don’t go!”
On a sunny morning on the shores of Los Angeles in a small house, a young boy of 11 years named Jason Smith wakes up to the smell of bacon. He rises from his bed, rushing downstairs to the kitchen, not caring that his blond hair is a mess, or that one side of his shirt is tucked and the other isn’t… Before the tragic accident everything seemed normal between Jason and his mother.
The Raven 