A Year in Reading: Destiny O. Birdsong
A Year of Shorts
This year, it was hard to stay focused on anything that wasn’t the news, so I found it difficult to finish books, though I did manage to squeeze in a few, including rereads of some of my faves, like Tommy Pico’s Feed, ZZ Packer’s Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, and Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam. Truthfully, I found it much easier to finish shorter pieces, some of which informed me about current events, while others helped me contextualize some of my personal life changes.
Late one April night, I stumbled on ’s “,” a piece in which Taylor breaks down how the intersections of’s “,” a news story about , a 38-year-old Black Mississippi woman who was the first to die of COVID-19 in her county after initially being misdiagnosed by a doctor who, at the time, was sitting on the city’s pandemic task force. Both articles made it clear to me how, as Southerners and Black women, me and so many people I love are vulnerable to this disease, but nothing hit home like reading about the of, an Afro-Latinx writer whose short story, “,” is a testament to the brilliance of Black women writers exploring the multiplicities of Diasporic identity. Each of these pieces reminded me that the numbers we often see flashing across news screens are only a fraction of the story. This year, we’ve lost Black and Brown brilliance in the form of artists, caretakers, daughters, parents, and peers. We’ve lost love and beauty. We’ve lost the heartbeats of so many communities.
