Issue 54: Summer 2026

Resistance rarely announces itself as one thing. It is the mural on a wall in Khartoum, and the artist who keeps making work after being forced to flee it. It is the fight to be refunded for what was taken, insisted on past every denial. It is a word passed down through three generations of women, refusing to be simplified into something smaller than it is. This issue of the

Our cover image, “Walk of Life 1,” is by Galal Yousif Goly, a Sudanese painter and muralist whose work became inseparable from the 2018-2019 revolution in Khartoum. Yousif fled the city in 2023 as the current genocide displaced millions of Sudanese, and has continued making work, including his 2024 series Forgotten Crisis, that insists on being seen. This piece predates the war, but its watercolor procession of figures moving together across an open field reads, in this context, like its own kind of resistance: a record of what still walks.

Among our features are interviews with AJ Haynes, lead singer and guitarist of the soul-rock band Seratones, reproductive justice advocate, and 2026 Grammy winner for Best Regional Roots Album, by Ruby Zlotkowski, and journalist, activist, and memoirist Loubna Mrie by Briana Bhola. Mrie, a Syrian who covered the war as a photojournalist for Reuters before her family was shattered by the same regime she opposed, recently published her memoir Defiance, and speaks here to what it costs, and what it demands, to testify against power that would rather you stayed silent.

In poetry, Jeni De La O, this issue’s poetry contest winner, gives us “A Small, Bounded Space,” a poem that turns an ordinary refund dispute into something with real stakes, its refrain of “money comes and money goes” pressed against the plain claim that “it was life or death.” K. Hari’s “Gulf of” holds tenderness inside violence in nearly every line, closing on the quiet instruction to learn “to breathe like this.” Bethany Bruno’s “After the Lake Broke Its Promise” and “The Museum of Unused Hours” turn disaster and private regret into their own forms of accounting, insisting that what is lost still be counted, still be witnessed.

Our fiction includes Aisha Abdel Gawad’s “Jeneen,” which follows a young war videographer navigating checkpoints, viral fame, and the impossible math of surviving long enough to keep telling the truth, and Stevie Chedíd’s “Daylight.” We’re thrilled to share that Stevie will be joining the New Orleans Review as our new nonfiction editor.

Our art includes Safia Latif’s “Landless” and “Eye in the Sky,” oil paintings that use magical realism to ask what it means to be forcefully unanchored, and what it means to be surveilled while still finding a way to pray. Alawaye Tope’s “The Union of Black Brothers” captures dignity worn into the fabric of an old car and older friendships, part of an ongoing meditation the artist calls Old Soul, on the traces time leaves behind.

We’re especially proud, this issue, to include two exceptional young writers: Mazzy Sleep, poet, and Ava Truong, essayist, respectively ages 13 and 17 when they wrote these pieces.

What unites this issue is the refusal to let resistance be reduced to a single shape. Sometimes it looks like a fight for survival. Sometimes it looks like a stubborn plant that will not die, a carrot passed through a car window, a poem that will not translate cleanly. Chosen from over 16,000 submissions, this work reminds us that the machinery of erasure meets its match in memory, in testimony, and in the plain refusal to look away.

In solidarity,

Lindsay Sproul

Editor-in-Chief