Naya Clark

The Underground Atlanta Arts and Culture Archive

Samiya Bashir’s critically-lauded, multimodal poetry collection, I Hope This Helps (2025, NightBoat Books), begins with a quote from actress Niecy Nash-Bett’s 2024 Emmy award acceptance speech: “I want to thank me for believing in me …” This bold tribute, which echoes Snoop Dogg’s words six years prior during his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony speech, sets the tone for much of what’s to come in her latest poetry art collection.
Published just a few years after Field Th...

In Paths Made by Walking: The Work of Howzevi Women in Iran, anthropologist Amina Tawasil draws deeply from her own lived experience and ethnographic fieldwork, crafting an intimate portrait of the women she encountered during her research in Iran. What began as a personal question about why women would choose to commit to practices that appeared externally limiting evolved into a far more nuanced exploration—one that challenged her initial assumptions. Tawasil reveals how the women she met w...

Canopy Atlanta continues to report in the communities we work in by listening to community members and attending neighborhood meetings to learn about what is happening. We then write about what we hear from the residents.

Canopy Atlanta also trains and pays community members, our Fellows, to learn reporting skills to better serve their community. Naya Clark, the reporter and photographer for this story, is a West End and Innovation Lab Fellow.

KYLE SEIBEL’S ‘HEY, YOU ASSHOLES’ IS NOT NEAT, BUT IT’S PERFECT: A CONVERSATION by Naya Clark
Kyle Seibel is not a veteran writer or a magical realism writer, but he is a veteran and his writing has magical and realistic attributes. He is still breaking into the literary world even though he seems to have a hang of it. He’s witty on a website we used to call Twitter, and can write a hell of a short story. Rarely does he add quotes when his characters are speaking and he doesn’t capitalize his...

Meet an environmental specialist in Cabbagetown who dreams of international travel and a $15,000 raise.

Meet this programs and marketing manager from West End. Jenn dreams of leisure time in the North Georgia mountains, biweekly manicures, and a dental plan

Earlier this year, Brooklyn-based poet and author Cynthia Manick released her latest poetry collection, No Sweet Without Brine (Amistad Press, 2023). Selected by the New York Public Library as one of the Best Books for Adults 2023, The work is wonderful, full of memory and wonder. Manick uses poetry to make the mundane feel like freedom while incorporating contemporary themes, such as Idris Elba’s narration on the Calm App, dating apps for welders, Ursula in The Little Mermaid, the classic no...

Lyzette Wanzer’s newest book, Trauma, Tresses, and Truth: Untangling our Hair Through Personal Narratives, (Lawrence Hill Books), explores the social, political, and everyday lives of Black women and their natural hair in an anthology of essays, narratives, and history.
In a way, this hybrid text mimics natural hair—it’s braided with complex experiences, woven with legalities and policies, and intertwined with poetry and imagery. Overall, it is a beautiful, textured body of work that teaches,...

Christmas is over. But Santa still has to make a living. During the holidays, André is the Black Santa of Atlanta. For the rest of the year, he’s a firearms safety instructor, a husband, and a dad. Here’s a look at his budget year-round.

Illustrations by Sarah Neuburger

INTERVIEW BY NAYA CLARK
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Silverfish, by Rone Shavers is an experimental novel that details a slice of life in the dystopian Incorporated States of America: a country much like our own, but one in which the corporatization of culture results in the commodification of human bodies. The central characters are Angel, a code-switching, artificial intelligence robot, and Clayton, a human “combat associate” whose job is to hunt, kill, and capitalize on “primitives,” those unaccounted-for humans who...

A$AP TyY, one of Harlem’s A$AP Mob members and a Bike Life pioneer, is known for his style and his affinity for gliding around the city on motorcycles, four-wheelers and dirt bikes. As a part of the collective, he has released new music, merch and collaborations this year. The man behind recent releases “100 Rounds,” “Who Ain’t With Me” and “Ting” discusses how his collaborative clothing design, Bike Life and rap lifestyles intersect.
“Bike Life plays a...

M. I. DEVINE IS A multidisciplinary writer, lyricist, and performer. An associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, Devine has published widely on an array of topics, his scholarship winning the 2019 Gournay Prize in Creative Nonfiction and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His most recent book, Warhol’s Mother’s Pantry: Art, America, and the Mom in Pop, published in November by Mad Creek Books, delves into the life and work of pop-...

How the neighborhood’s artists are adapting to the COVID-19 era

Naya Clark discusses with Peter Ramos his book Poetic Encounters in the Americas: Remarkable Bridge. In Remarkable Bridge Ramos delves into what goes into poetic translations, referencing poets such as James Wright and César Vallejo; Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda and Langston Hughes; Luis Palés Matos and William Carlos Williams; Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz, and more.
In this interview, Ramos answers questions regarding how language and place literally and figuratively cross boundaries and c...