It is with a bottomless sense of gratitude that we offer to you Issue 001: Worldbending. Our inaugural issue materializes a channel in which readers can, through engagement with contemporary arts writing and cultural criticism, unearth what is alive for them and discover what place is theirs. With contributions from Akwaeke Emezi, J Wortham, Joshua Segun-Lean, Diallo Simon-Ponte and, Rianna Jade Parker, our inaugural issue illuminates our belief in the vital necessity of those who conjure planets of language around the work of artists who reflect our world back to itself with atomic precision and celestial foresight.

To speak of Worldbending (a term culled from Emezi’s Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir) is to posit that the reality we have inherited is malleable material, flexible flesh that we can sculpt in accordance with our needs and desires. To speak of Worldbending is to set ablaze all that depends on our destruction; To speak of Worldbending, then, is also to stay long after the fire subsides such that we may gather ash to draw more concentric circles of sanctified selves. To speak of Worldbending is to marshall the force of our inner-eyes, those ways of seeing, feeling and being that remind us how urgent it is to peer into the cyclone for long enough to know we are of it–For it is with such ferocity that we bend the world into being anew.

This inaugural offering is centered, also, in our devotion to providing readers with language that expands their sense of agency such that they relate to themselves as people who are invested not only in witnessing the world shifting around them, but being active architects of the world they wish to inhabit. As galvanized by the assiduous, lyrically unflinching, and spellbinding work gathered here, may we speculate towards an eventual and inevitable break, and craft the horizons in which we hope to bask in the aftermath.

Always (in orbit),