Killens Review of Arts & Letters (Spring 2025): Black Youth
Edited by Mudiwa Pettus

The theme of this issue of the Killens Review of Arts & Letters is Black Youth. A photograph of Dr. Myrah Brown Green’s quilt, “The Administrator: You Belong at the Table,” serves as the issue’s cover image. “The Administrator” is a part of Green’s Guardian series, a collection of quilts that depict a diverse group of defenders and nurturers of Black personhood. This issue, with a particular focus on the singularity of Black youth, illustrates the importance of protecting all that is precious within Black life.

As an editorial team, we are grateful to have been able to include the creative expression and brilliance of Black youth writers and artists in this issue. A finger-painting toddler from New Orleans, a fourteen-year-old poet repping Brooklyn, and a courageous undergraduate student attending Lehman College are among the voices reminding us that the “[Y]outh got somethin’ to say!”

As we know, wherever there is Black life, there are systemic and systematic attempts to suppress it. Our contributors explore how mass incarceration, reproductive injustice, enduring racialized and gendered stereotypes, heteropatriarchy, among other violences, impact the lives of Black youth. Our world leaders, across the political spectrum, have a hand in engineering and sustaining this violence, a reality that might drive us to despair. Thus, a focus on Black youth might steady our will to forge ahead.

In an editorial published in The Crisis in 1912, the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois cautioned his Black readership that “If the great battle of human right against poverty, against disease, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won not in our day, but in the day of our children’s children. Ours is the blood and dust of battle, theirs the rewards of victory.”

More than a century later, our time remains the blood and dust of battle. Yet, as our ancestors dreamed of and struggled for a victorious future for us, we must do the same for our progeny. Undoubtedly, the lifework of Dr. Brenda Greene, the founding Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature who spearheaded the Killens Review of Arts & Letters, exemplifies what it means to enact freedom dreams for Black life. Dr. Greene has been a valiant champion for Black literature, Black writers, Black readers, Black students—in short, Black people.

In her retirement from the Center for Black Literature and Medgar Evers College, she will have the opportunity to work on projects that have long been calling her name. Those of us who know the power of her will and genius are excited to see what new fruits her labor will produce, and we take comfort in the fact that she will not be able to wander too far from the Center’s happenings. Also, we will be keeping ourselves occupied by tending to the legacy we are inheriting. Like Du Bois, Dr. Greene, too, has given us our orders: Onward!

Mudiwa Pettus, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief