July 11, 2020 

Dear Readers,

Thank you all for your patience in waiting for our belated Spring 2020 issue of Barzakh. Barzakh, like many other institutions and publications, was not immune to the COVID-19 pandemic. Neither was it defeated. We are grateful here at the magazine for our continued support from the University at Albany’s Department of English and the New York State Writers Institute through good times and bad. We also owe a special thanks to Corri Wells, our Special Guest Section Editor for this issue’s themed section, “On Incarceration”. Wells is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Iron City Magazine: Creative Expressions By and For the Incarcerated and we can think of no better curator for this year’s special section.

“On Incarceration” grew out of the success of our 10th Anniversary Special Issue in 2019 where we celebrated past and present University at Albany friends and alumni. In addition to accepting work on all kinds of topics this year, we asked the literary community for their poems, prose, and works of art that engage with the topic of incarceration in its many iterations. The response was remarkable.

We are proud to offer here a glimpse into a difficult and pervasive topic, one which, here at Barzakh, we believe deserves more attention. We are also proud to offer some escape during a tumultuous period in the history of our country and our planet. As you read through this beautiful and bigger-than-ever issue of Barzakh, we hope you find some respite from whatever 2020 has presented you with thus far. This respite, however, will never be far from the very real issues that affect us all. And nor should it be.

Reginald Dwayne Betts writes in “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving” from his book of poems Felon (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), “history is no sieve & sanity is no elixir / & I am bound to be haunted”. We are all bound to be haunted, both by the strength of suppressed voices as well as by their suppression, and we must not try to escape those ghosts. Rather, we shall try to name them. In “Essay on Reentry” Betts writes, “Tell me. What name for / this thing that haunts, this thing we become”.

These are our continued attempts to name the unnameable.

With love,

Yolande Gallouët Schutter

Editor-in-Chief

Yolande Schutter, Editor-in-Chief, with Prof. Edward Schwarzschild, Barzakh’s Faculty Advisor, and our undergraduate intern Kianni Brown, at the New York State Writers Institute’s 2nd Annual Book Fair, September 2019.

Yolande Schutter, Editor-in-Chief, with Prof. Edward Schwarzschild, Barzakh’s Faculty Advisor, and our undergraduate intern Kianni Brown, at the New York State Writers Institute’s 2nd Annual Book Fair, September 2019.

Barzakh’s table at the New York State Writers Institute’s 2nd Annual Book Fair, September 2019.

Barzakh’s table at the New York State Writers Institute’s 2nd Annual Book Fair, September 2019.

Barzakh’s table at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Annual Conference (AWP) in San Antonio, Texas, just days before national lockdown due to COVID-19, March 2020.

Barzakh’s table at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Annual Conference (AWP) in San Antonio, Texas, just days before national lockdown due to COVID-19, March 2020.