In the foreword to Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology, published by Sarabande Books this week, editor Joy Priest recounts driving from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Houston at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. At one point she stops in Richmond, Virginia, and drives down Monument Avenue with “its parade of Confederate statues lining the street’s median,” and later, in Louisville, Kentucky, notes how “the streets were filled with smoke, flash-bangs, and tear gas, not just over the murder of George Floyd but also over the murder of one of our own by Louisville police: Breonna Taylor.” Write an essay structured around a road trip in which the places you visit are central to the essay’s subject. Consider the history of the places you have visited as well as the encounters you have had there.
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