The days, weeks, and months leading to this semester's publication were, to put it mildly, uncertain. Meeting the challenge of surpassing what we considered a successful come-back issue was daunting. The pressure to outdo ourselves and do something new lurked as we met and sent out the call for submissions. As a literary Journal, our job is not only to publish a good poem or short story that needs attention but to take a photograph "with words" and show the world a different perspective. We want to demonstrate through verse what it means to be human and how brown skin dramatizes the collective human condition. "I once came home to bullet holes in my bedroom as a result of my mother's struggle with schizophrenia" writes Troy Baker in "Reflections of Poverty." In this issue, one of the many themes we explore is the blues: what it's like to be broke, and how it differs from being broke and, say, white. We bear witness. We sit back, then, go to our composition notebooks and/or laptops and create literature.

When the doubt of whether there was something new to be done for this semester became overwhelming, I sat back in my room and considered the title of our Journal: The Amistad. I can't imagine the uncertainty our ancestors must have felt. I am sure, though, that it outweighed my personal uncertainty about how to keep a recently recovered literary journal afloat, and healthy, and pointed in the right direction as my graduation date approaches at a supersonic pace.

As a writer and leader of The Amistad all I can do is emulate what our ancestors did for us: never failing to tell the stories that needed to be heard (the light-hearted and heart-breaking) as they continued to do the work that needed to get done. With our changing world, the need for community, exchange of ideas, stories, and culture are of particular importance, and what better way to do that than this online literary journal? Our submissions are growing. In one semester, we've managed to spread the word about Howard University's The Amistad in India, several parts of Africa, and all over the United States. In this issue, we have installed an art gallery which will expand our definition of what a "text" is. As one of my professors points out a "text is anything that can be read or analyzed." Therefore, our commitment to sharing the "texts" of people of color on a global scale has also expanded.

In this longer issue, we found some really good poems and short stories; however, we are pleased to report a number of additions: three interviews, more essays, short drama, an art gallery, an art resource, and a listing of literary events. It is our hope that with each of these additions you, our readers, will see the hard work we've put into this Journal and commit yourselves to making sure that this Journal never sinks again. By that I mean, telling people about the Journal, volunteering to organize an event, helping us in sponsoring events, and/or becoming contributors.

I look forward to reading your comments as to what we have done in this issue. There are a number of repeated themes in the poems and prose contributions that we've received. Our writers are concerned about their culture, whether it's the tensions of being born in the North but feeling psychically dislocated because the soul of black folks, as W.E.B DuBois' work attests, is in the South; or the encroaching influence of modernity; or the revisionist lines of the poem "Afro Centric" as poet Allison Mathews conjures the memory of Malcolm X "raise from the dead and lead us/ just one mo' 'gain." Perhaps, you may be struck by the emphasis of death in some of our writer's pieces as the issues of suicide, the AIDS epidemic are well represented in our published works. As the expression goes, any good art should serve as a mirror, calling its audience to action.

I have hope, faith even, that The Amistad will be OK. There's something resilient about Howard University. Just recently we celebrated our 140th charter. Howard University was chartered in 1867, today it is 2007. The Amistad is the grandchild of Howard's earlier literary Journal Stylus, of which Zora Neale Hurston was a writer and editor, and after that came Janus, and after that, The Amistad.

If you would like in any way to contribute, volunteer, or help The Amistad grow, please contact me.

Read. Be inspired,