About Us
Whether it be celebrities like Terry McMillan, winner of The American Book Award, or Oscar winner Lou Gossett or newcomers like Brynn Saito or Alex Maynard, since 1990, Konch has been publishing American and international writers of the highest merit. Konch is sustained by Ishmael Reed, Tennessee Reed and our readers, granting us an independence that those zines with corporate sponsorship lack. Contributors to Konch have submitted work that is innovative and serene, but we reserve the right to be rowdy. The Jim Crow Media and literary Scene Have Failed Us.
Editorial
EDITORIAL, Winter/Spring 2026
From the publisher
KONCH Persists
We’re combining Winter with Spring 2026 for this issue. We’ve been busy launching Tar Baby magazine, published by the Toni Morrison Foundation, subscription available from ford@tarbaby.com.
Now that Tar Baby is off the ground, we’re back at Konch with our usual heavy hitters. Vitin A. Cruz continues his remarkable work with Behind the Grey Rhino, Part VI…. We introduce newcomers Zanai West and Jason D. Joseph. Arthur Flowers, the High Priest of North American HooDoo, is here. One of the great postmodern choreographers, Carla Blank, provides an excerpt from her work-in-progress, Anonymous Dancer.
We have a packed poetry section with outstanding work by Jeffery Renard Allen, Miho Kinnas, E. Ethelbert Miller, recipient of a PEN Oakland prize for literature, Javid Naam and Julia Wright prove that while journalists may record history, poets get to the heart of history.
We’re beginning a new series called State of the Union. Our first contributors are Alison Mills Newman, Playthell Benjamin and Ali M. Collins, who writes about the demise of one of those fascist busy bodies who insist that we read what they read, worship the way they worship, and overall share their values. We print an excerpt from Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman, the novel that inspired the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” to show that armed resistance to Black voting rights isn’t new.
Contributors
Vitin A. Cruz is a native of San Francisco who graduated from high school in Puerto Rico. He’s been writing since a young age.
Zanai West is a writer from Connecticut whose work explores love, grief, and the quiet resilience of the human spirit. Her debut novel, If Love Were the Remedy, centers on a young woman navigating depression, family, and first love during one transformative summer. Her next novel is forthcoming in July 2026. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found wandering bookstores or building playlists for the stories she’s telling.
Find her on socials:
@ zanaiwest on instagram and Tiktok
@ zanaijwest on X
Jason D. Joseph conceived in St Croix US Virgin Islands, born in Oakland, California, a degree in Global Studies and a career in education serving Oakland and the Greater East Bay. Jason strives to be a person that speaks truth to power and corrects things that have fallen. Giving back to the community the best way he knows, by empowering the minds that will usher change in our world.
Arthur Flowers, native of Memphis, author of novels, creative nonfiction, and graphic works, is a bluesbased performance artist / delta griot. His latest work is The Hoodoo Book of Flowers: the Great Black Book of Generations. He has been Exec. Dir. of The Harlem Writers Guild and various nonprofits. He is webmaster of Rootsblog, and Rootwork.com, Emeritus Professor, Syracuse University, and a practitioner of literary hoodoo.
Carla Blank’s most recent book is “A Jew in Ramallah and Other Essays (Baraka Books, 2024),” a collection of her essays written between 2003-2024. Also check out her interviews: one with theater and film director Luis Valdez in Tar Baby, Volume #3, 2025, and another online in CounterPunch, with writer Fae Myenne Ng: https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/08/fae-myenne-ng-preservationist-an-asian-american-author-who-refuses-to-assimilate/
Jeffery Renard Allen is the award-winning author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the celebrated novel Song of the Shank, which was a front-page review in both The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle. Allen’s other accolades include The Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for Fiction, The Chicago Public Library’s Twenty-First Century Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, a grant from Creative Capital, a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a NYFA grant, residencies at the Bellagio Center, Jan Michalski Fondation, Ucross, The Hermitage, VCCA, Monson Arts, and Jentel Arts, and fellowships at The Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Allen is the Africa Editor for The Evergreen Review. His latest books are the short story collection Fat Time and the memoir An Unspeakable Hope, the latter co-authored with Leon Ford.Allen makes his home in Johannesburg and New York. Find out more about him at www.writerjefferyrenardallen.com.
Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Miho Kinnas is a translator, writer, and poet. The poem, Three Shrimp Boats on The Horizon, was selected for Best American Poetry 2023. Also in 2023, a rengay written with Lenard D. Moore appeared in Tandem, Vol2, No2 and her translation of a poem by Tanaka Ikuko was published in Tokyo Poetry Journal Vol 12. She writes essays and book reviews for journals including Re-Markings, American Book Review and Literary Shanghai Alluvium. She runs a series of workshops based on short Japanese poetic forms at Writers.com and New York Writers’ Workshop. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the City University of Hong Kong. Her latest books are We Eclipse into The Other Side, collaborated with Miho Kinnas, published by Pinyon Publishing and Waiting for Sunset to Bury Red Camellias, published by Free Verse Press.
E. Ethelbert Miller is a writer and literary activist. He received the Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award in 2024 and the Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN Oakland in 2025.
Javid Naam is a regular contributor to Konch.
Julia Wright is the elder daughter of the late writer Richard Wright. She is the author of For The Baby Ancestors in Gaza - and other Poems for Palestine soon to be published by Fighting Words.
Alison Mills Newman is a minister, poet, author, actress, musician, and film producer and award-winning film director. She has a B.A. in Theology, and currently serves as Chaplain at the Fulton County Jails. Alison is the first African American female teenage actress to have a popular, recurring role in NBC's groundbreaking, pioneering tv show “Julia,” starring the beautiful Diahann Carroll,where she played Corey Bakers babysitter. She is also a cast member of CBS first Variety tv show starring a black woman, the talented Leslie Uggams, where she played Leslie Uggams sister in the first black family sitcom titled “Sugar Hill.” She is the author of cult classic masterpiece, Francisco ( originally published by Reed, Cannon and Johnson) recently re-released by New Directions in 2023 and Maggie Three. She is producer, writer, actress of three films screened on television, and presently available for viewing on “Tubi.” Currently she is a directing a play in Atlanta at the Ben Hill Baptist church, titled “Two Faces in the Shadows.” She was married to Francisco Newman, parents to five beautiful children, and eleven amazing grandchildren.
Ali M. Collins is an educator, writer, and activist known for her fearless advocacy on behalf of low-income Black, Brown, and immigrant families. When she was a member of the San Francisco School Board, she authored historic resolutions to desegregate and diversity instruction, remove police from schools, and ensure low-income students had access to art and music instruction. Due to her ground-breaking work, Collins and her family were targeted by tech fascists and segregationists. She was removed from office in a multimillion-dollar recall funded by the PayPal Mafia. Her attackers now have high profile roles or contracts with the Trump administration.
The San Francisco School Board recall was the topic of The Conductor, a satirical play by revolutionary playwright and author, Ishmael Reed. As a result of these experiences, Collins began researching the right-wing backlash against education justice, and democracy with her podcast Just Talks Podcast with Ali Collins You can listen on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and via Patreon.”
Playthell Benjamin is an Independent Public Intellectual. He has been an activist in the black liberation movement, a founding member of the W.E.B. Dubois Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, during 1969the first degree granting Black Studies Department in the world. This department acquired Dr. DuBois' vast papers and letters with the backing of the University, and they are now deposited in the impressive DuBois Library at U-Mass. He taught African and Afro-American history. He went on to a career as an award-winning journalist. His articles on politics, culture and sport have been published in the Manchester Guardian, Sunday Times of London, Village Voice, Freedomways, Emerge, et al.
Thomas Frederick Dixon Jr. (January 11, 1864 – April 3, 1946) was an American white supremacist and polymath: a Baptist minister, politician, lawyer, lecturer, writer, and filmmaker. Dixon wrote two best-selling novels, The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), that romanticized Southern white supremacy, endorsed the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, opposed equal rights for black people, and glorified the Ku Klux Klan as heroic vigilantes. Film director D. W. Griffith adapted The Clansman for the screen in The Birth of a Nation (1915). The film inspired the creators of the 20th-century rebirth of the Klan.
Playthell Benjamin
