By Paisley Hibou

You're sparkly on the inside, so you want to advertise your inner sparkle with some outer sparkle. Glitter is here for you. Glitter hair, glitter eyes, glitter cheeks, glitter lips, glitter nails, glitter everything! So how do you know if you're wearing enough? You're probably not, but just to be sure, here are 7 signs you need to pile on more glitter:
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By Christine Sloan Stoddard

Leza Cantoral's collection Trash Panda (CLASH Books) brands itself as a bunch of "rly emo poems"—and at first glance, it's exactly that. An adorable cartoon panda head and bubbly polka-dots grace the book's cover. There are angsty, snarky, and narcissistic poems about crying, selfies, Justin Beiber, and avocado toast. But it would be a mistake to read this whole collection as an Instagram poetry stream packaged for easy, breezy print. As much as Cantoral assumes the voice of a vapid, mentally disturbed goth girl who spends way too much time online, Trash Panda is full of depth, nuance, and texture. Dismissing the narrator in Trash Panda means you fell for the trap. She's smarter and more complex than you think. She is more than her avatar. Stop reducing her to an Internet stereotype or you will miss the whole show.
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By Erynn Porter

So yeah, ​Super Bowl ​2019 huh? I’m not one for sports, but unless you live under a rock, you heard about this year’s ​Super Bowl. The NFL has been in hot water the past couple of years due to their treatment of former San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback, Colin Kaepernick.
 
In 2016, Kaepernick started a peaceful protest against police brutality towards people of color by kneeling during the national anthem. This caused many fans to rage against the quarterback, claiming he was being “anti-American.”
 
Of course, one of best perks of being an American is the freedom of speech and right to protest...but we'll move on.
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By M. Alouette

Do you feel pressured to tell a story you're not ready to tell? With the Internet's call for constant publishing and the popularity of confessional web essays, that's not surprising. The pressure from publishers and editors or even other writers can weigh down on any wordsmith. If you're not ready to write about a personal experience, don't. Every writer should challenge themselves and aim for a degree of vulnerability, but there's a time and a place. 
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Words and Image by Gretchen Gales

I’ve only recently become a perfume snob. Well, maybe snob is too harsh and not accurate of my experience with perfumes and other scented products. I’ve always liked being able to have a unique scent depending on what I’m feeling or what I want to feel like.
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By Madison Manske
Capital News Service

RICHMOND, Virginia - The Valentine chose a day celebrating love to open its new exhibit “Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion,” a series of design ideas to tackle conversations about race and the five Confederate statues on historic Monument Avenue.
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By Ghia Vitale

​I always count myself as a valentine on Valentine’s Day. For autosexuals and autoromantics, Valentine’s Day is another opportunity to enjoy loving ourselves. However, you don’t have to be sexually or emotionally attracted to yourself to be your own valentine. All you need to do is embrace self-love.

By ​Melina Bee

​The museum and urban cultural center Beit Beirut merges pre- and post-war Lebanon to create a healing space. The building once occupied the physical border between warring factions to the east and west. Now it occupies the emotional border between a painful history and the promise of a better future.

The museum's exhibits, as well as the building itself, stand as a testament to a resilient country and people still reconciling loss and hope. Beit Beirut currently showcases the remnants of a photo studio it once housed, as well as modern photos which capture the reality of child labor. When he designed the building in 1924, architect Youssef Aftmus could never have imagined the horrors that would later take place here. Originally named Beit Barakat after the family who commissioned it, the building quickly earned the enduring nickname of “the yellow house” due to its sandstone facade.

The spacious, airy layout, and prime location were a major draw for middle class families and ground floor shops. Tragically, these same features would attract danger and violence during the Lebanese Civil War. 
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By The Editors

It's 2019 and a Texas official recently called Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "bimbo." Surprised? We wish we were. But this isn't exactly the friendliest political climate for women, particularly women of color.  That's why we're excited about LISTEN: Artists Respond to Politics, an exhibit hitting BronxArtSpace in the Bronx's Mott Haven neighborhood. (Not part of A.O.C.'s district, but we're still here for the #AOC hype.) LISTEN features the work of 13 women and gender non-conforming artists, including Seyi Adebanjo, Lizzy Alejandro, Pamela Cortez, Quail Bell Magazine founder Christine Sloan Stoddard, and others—and just in time for National Women's Month, with the bulk of the show taking place in March. LISTEN runs Feb. 27-April 6, and there's a flurry of related workshops and other special events to bring you back more than once. 

​Curator Deborah Yasinsky was kind enough to answer a few of our questions about the exhibit in advance of the busy installation process:

How would you describe the themes and content of LISTEN in a sentence?
 
LISTEN: Artists Respond to Politics focuses on artists' work that responds to our current political times and the #MeToo movement. Artists address an array of themes, including social, political, and gender constructs. 
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By Virginia Sánchez

I'm used to mainstream fashion and beauty magazines neglecting visibly non-white women in their photo shoots and advertisements, but I expect better from independent magazines. A so-called feminist culture publication of any kind needs diverse representation. Black, brown, and yellow women need a clear presence in indie magazines. You should find images of them on the homepage. You should find images of them as illustrations in articles, essays, short stories, and poems. You should find them on the masthead, too, but I'll set aside the lack of diversity in magazine staffs for the purposes of this op-ed and focus on image curation. Representation in image curation improves when more non-white women are on staff, but it's also something white editors can take the initiative to do. These days, with stock photography and social media embeds at an editor's disposal, there's no excuse not to have women of color grace their pages. No more lip service will do—action is all that matters.
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By Christine Sloan Stoddard

The New York City travel photos in this post depict grotesques, which are similar to gargoyles but lack a water spout. Just look at the monsters' mouths to see what I mean. There's no place for rain water to come out. Now that you know you're looking at grotesques and not cemetery statues, I'm going to tell you a story that my ceramic sculpture professor told me and that you might've seen in the news last summer:

​By Kathleen Shaw
Capital News Service

RICHMOND, Virginia— Patients who rely on musical therapy to overcome trauma may remain susceptible to receiving unqualified care after a House subcommittee watered down a bill by Sen. Jill Holtzman Vogel.

By M. Alouette

Many poets dread poetry readings for all kinds of reasons. The schmoozing. The self-promotion. The careerism Maybe they're afraid of meeting a poet whose work they love only to discover that they don't like them as a person. Maybe they're nervous about feeling obligated to spend money on drinks, food, and new books when they're broke. Maybe they don't want to leave the house and brave public transportation or figure out parking near the venue. But perhaps the biggest reason many poets fear poetry readings is pure anxiety. They are afraid of getting up in front of a group of people and reading. If this is you, be kind to yourself.

By Kaytlin Nickens
Capital News Service

RICHMOND, Virginia — Outlining a “dark and shameful chapter of American history,” state legislators have unanimously passed resolutions to “acknowledge with profound regret the existence and acceptance of lynching” in Virginia, where more than 80 people — mostly African-American men — were killed by mobs in the decades after the Civil War.
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By Christine Sloan Stoddard

Dear Facebook friends who better have the self-awareness to know who they are,

I’m not looking for action. I’m happily married and intend to stay that way. If you connected with me on Facebook primarily because you have romantic intentions in mind, please unfriend me. If you try to connect with me on Facebook for the same reason, I will ignore you. I’m not interested in hearing about whatever fake art or publishing project you made up to get my attention under false pretenses. I don’t care if our work appeared in the same show or magazine if you’re only bringing it up to mack on me. I definitely don’t want your shameless flirting, vulgar messages, or dick pics. What you want is NEVER going to happen.
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By M. Alouette

When you submit work to a literary magazine, you understand that rejection is a possibility. Editors, in their role, are gatekeepers. They can choose to craft those gates (high or loss, gold or nickel) and open and close them how they wish. You understand that they may close the gates to you, or at least the work you have submitted for their consideration this time. All I'm asking is that editors consider their power and close their gates with kindness.
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By Christine Sloan Stoddard

Dear Public Relations Reps,

I know it is your job to send press releases. I also know that you might have to bang out a few in a single day and then blast them to hundreds, or even thousands, of bloggers and media outlets by COB. For you, it's a numbers game. Your boss hands you the same massive (and dusty) address book the agency's been using for ages or emails you an extensive Excel spreadsheet some woeful intern spent an entire summer updating. Then you type in addresses or copy and paste and press 'send' until your pointer finger bleeds. I get it: You're just doing what you're told because you're trying to pay the bills. But isn't the real point of these e-blasts to get responses from writers, editors, and producers? What your clients really care about is how many features and interviews you land for them, not how many emails you sent. My advice to you—since I get asked all the time—is to do your research.

By Alex Sparrow

By Ghia Vitale

She Echoed by Pamela Gallaway is a poetry book about internal exploration and living an authentic life.

By The Editors

When we're not spotlighting authors, musicians, and other typical "artsy fartsy" types we adore, we also love discovering anyone who has brought something uniquely innovative to the world. Enter Slash Coleman, a man who has brought the joy and healing power of laughter to Richmond, Virginia after a life-altering event re-routed his purpose. Unsurprisingly, he's also an "artsy fartsy" type as well. We can't break Quail Bell tradition. 

Read on to find insightful answers about a healthy work-life balance, the benefits of nonprofit work, and incorporating all kinds of art in your everyday life: 

By The Editors

Too many kids grow up believing that whom they love is wrong. That's why Emma Eden Ramos—a writer, editor, and teacher based in New York City—knew there needed to be more voices representing resilience in the face of hatred. Ramos curated a mixture of poetry, short stories, and art in an anthology called Love_Is_Love. Emma hopes that the book, which features the work of adult writers and artists, will resonate with teens struggling to embrace their identity, and also fundraise for The Trevor Project. The Trevor Project is a national non-profit that offers suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to LGBTQ teens.

In our interview with Ramos, we got a chance to talk about the process behind the anthology and consider ordering a copy for someone in your life or for yourself.
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By Virginia Sánchez

In career-focused contexts, writers are told to aim for their "dream publications." Pick up a how-to book on jumpstarting your writing career and you'll find that advice. Scroll through LinkedIn groups for writers. Boom. It's there. I don't have a problem with this advice, per se. You should dream in life. Give yourself that permission. My issue is that mainstream, national publications—the dinosaurs—are the implied, or sometimes explicit dream publications, mentioned in these contexts. Because then the implication that if you fail to land bylines in those publications, you are a failure. How careerist. How Capitalist. How ew.

By The Editors

Maybe you've read about the inspiration for Quail Bell before. But something you won't find in any interview with founder Christine Sloan Stoddard is mention of Beltway Poetry Quarterly. And that is a grave mistake! Christine first encountered Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an online journal for the Washington, D.C. area, as a teen. (Yes, she was, and still is, a weirdo.) For a taste of BPQ, check out the Winter 2019 issue, guest edited by Dan Vera. Maybe you'll catch a whiff of Quail Bell in there.

By Corrine Fizer
Capital News Service

​RICHMOND, Virginia — Following Gov. Ralph Northam’s admission that he darkened his skin for a Michael Jackson contest in 1984, Attorney General Mark Herring acknowledged Wednesday that he once wore blackface to a college party nearly 40 years ago.

By Katja Timm
Capital News Service

RICHMOND, Virginia — While activists urge Gov. Ralph Northam to resign over a racist yearbook photo, his would-be successor — Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax — is facing a sexual assault accusation.