Issue 1 - Transition - Symposeum Magazine

Vital Arrogant Fatal Dominant: On Poems, Attention, and Relation

Why poetry matters in times of great global change.

Bridging the Gap: Women in Engineering

In the Black Hills of South Dakota there’s a highway interchange made of wood that might stand as a test for engineers. It might also tell us something about the way we educate girls in this country, and thus something about the puzzle

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Conception to Delivery of the COVID-19 Vaccine

A fter nine months of clinical trials, the COVID-19 vaccine is finally being delivered. This breakthrough marks the end of a tragic era of unprecedented financial and logistical burdens. For many, the vaccine is an inoculation against both the virus and despair, a shot

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Banjo Heritage: The Unlikely Survival of a Southern Folkway

What follows is a conversation between George Gibson, Clifton Hicks, and Symposeum editor Nissim Lebovits. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. G eorge Gibson and Clifton Hicks

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Da 5 Bloods Movie Review: Spike Lee Takes on Double Consciousness

S pike Lee’s latest and critically acclaimed film, Da 5 Bloods, released direct-to-Netflix in June 2020—less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd and only two months before the death of starring actor Chadwick Boseman. While Lee’s previous films

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Review of A Journey to the Underworld: From Here to Eternity

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death By Caitlin Doughty Illustrated by Landis Blair. 248 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. Book Review by Alexandria Kominsky | Drawings by Courtney W. Brothers I n From Here to Eternity: Traveling the

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I consider a chestnut

Your browser does not support the audio element. Reading by the author There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be. —Wallace Stevens, “Notes Toward a Supreme

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Drawing from the Music of Benjamin Britten

I think in pictures. Like a single seed that eventually forms an arbor, this particular trait has determined the entire infrastructure of my practice as an artist and has continued to shape my life in many other ways. Hopeless with verbal directions, I am

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another kind of maiden voyage

Your browser does not support the audio element. Reading by the author it might have been a menacing sky that greeted him in new york in 1938. if it spoke in english he did not understand. his tongue was polish polish polish. he didn’

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Winter Garden After Rain (2020)

Ink on paper | 18 x 12 inches Artist’s Note This painting depicts the change of season in a cold room after a cold winter. I painted it at a time when I did not know what was next, just that I would be

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Two Maidens (2020)

Mixed media collage on canvas | 36 x 24 inches Artist’s Note In my final year of college, a professor prompted me to re-imagine an image from the school’s archives. I was enthralled by the idea of translating a piece of art into

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Thermodynamics of Cybersecurity

O utside my apartment window, piles of snow lay coated with an icy sheen formed overnight. Inside, the warm air condenses on the windows. Droplets form and break free, running down the foggy glass in the morning light. I am fortunate to have a

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Cartoons on Transition by Brooke Bourgeois

Artist’s Note When the tropes of time before COVID-19 went into hibernation, Brooke shifted to mining the strangeness of the now-hackneyed ‘new normal’ for cartoon inspiration. She looks to draw connections between common experience and stories in the cultural cannon, ranging from the

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Mondays at One o'Clock

I was seven years old when I began visiting Lenore. Having recently relocated to Spokane, Washington from Charlottesville, Virginia, I finally had an opportunity to meet some of my dad’s family. Lenore was my eighty-nine-year-old fourth cousin. She had no children and had

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Silicon Prairie

Holberton School Tulsa Executive Director, Libby Ediger S ometime between 1828 and 1836, after being driven out of Alabama, Muscogee tribe members settled under a large burr tree along the Arkansas River in Oklahoma. They called their territory “Tulasi,” meaning “old town” in the

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Empire Twilight: The End of the Day (2020)

Mixed media collage and acrylic paint on canvas | 24 x 36 inches Artist’s Note In keeping with this issue’s theme of transitions, my painting, “Empire Twilight: The End of the Day,” is part of an ongoing painting series using my officially declassified

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The Rhythms of Time

A few weeks ago, amidst a global pandemic, I subjected my ninth-graders to the classic nostalgia-fueled E.B. White essay “Once More to the Lake.” No one had done the assigned reading, and then a fire drill took up the first fifteen minutes of

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The Perfect Plan

An ex-CIA analyst transitions to work on the family flower farm, and fatherhood.

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An Old War in a New World

A first-generation immigrant, Rhodes Scholar, and Biden Administration member on America's battle over identity.

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Letter To Readers

Our inaugural Issue 0 of Symposeum, which published last November, explored a theme of liminal space. It released in the midst of a presidential election, a racial reckoning, and a global pandemic still raging. But the nature of in-between times is that they are,

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Rounding Error

Your browser does not support the audio element. Reading by the author There's a quiet power to those I saw Jesus in my toast stories. Stunned devotees posing alongside burnt bread all holy and humorless. To think, one morning they awoke and willed their

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Un coup de pouce (2020)

Paper, adhesive | 8 x 12 inches Artist’s Note The French expression un coup de pouce conjures a tender force: the shock of a blow, un coup, in concert with the inner digit of a human hand, un pouce. Its uncanny charm brims with

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More Voices Still

I t is a well-worn truth that translation—especially translation of poetry—is a process of interpretation. The reader needs a pathway to navigate new text, and the translator is tasked with forging this path through landscapes of meaning both plain and obscure. Caught

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Ukarumpa

Your browser does not support the audio element. Reading by the author I am the red, red stain. – Michael Dom No matter what I make and unmake here With these hands, there will always be that snake And that tree where those four rivers