Kevin Contento

Alice is a college freshman aiming for law school. On the day her financial aid is cut, her secret identity is revealed to her classmates.

In Pahokee, Florida, the myth of the absent Black father is contradicted every day: housework, children’s birthdays, neighbourhood, care. In vignettes brimming with solidarity, Contento traces out his protagonists’ self-confidence. Calm and attentive.

A non-binary queer teen cultivates community, individuality, and resilience through the subculture of the DIY punk scene in Little Village.

Living on the margins of American society, a Florida boy comes in contact with the sacred.

"As we live our lives in minute-after-minute sequential time, we know that something else exists beyond its borders: the all-at-once ceremonial time, the time of ecstatic fire that pierces the membranes separating the now from eternity. [It] is an invocation of ceremonial time, performed by several friends... and played out amid the cane fields of south Florida. For these teen boys, who are high school footballers, JROTC cadets, and weekend rabbit-hunters, the leap into ceremonial time is made via their discovery of the 12th-century Persian poem of the title, in which the world’s birds gather to seek out their king. As the poem’s stanzas flow on, their present-tense life is infused with the past; they become Silk Road merchants, desert water-bearers, sainted martyrs. The Conference of the Birds exists within this metamorphosis, capturing its central band of seekers in their plain-clothes reality and at the same time wrapping them in robes of myth." -Jonathan Kieran

A small supermarket somewhere in the American backwoods. The staff come in early, drink coffee and restock the shelves. They chat about the air conditioning, would like to read poetry in peace and sometimes even get lucky on the slot machine.

Alice is a college freshman aiming for law school. On the day her financial aid is cut, her secret identity is revealed to her classmates.

In Pahokee, Florida, the myth of the absent Black father is contradicted every day: housework, children’s birthdays, neighbourhood, care. In vignettes brimming with solidarity, Contento traces out his protagonists’ self-confidence. Calm and attentive.

A non-binary queer teen cultivates community, individuality, and resilience through the subculture of the DIY punk scene in Little Village.

Living on the margins of American society, a Florida boy comes in contact with the sacred.

"As we live our lives in minute-after-minute sequential time, we know that something else exists beyond its borders: the all-at-once ceremonial time, the time of ecstatic fire that pierces the membranes separating the now from eternity. [It] is an invocation of ceremonial time, performed by several friends... and played out amid the cane fields of south Florida. For these teen boys, who are high school footballers, JROTC cadets, and weekend rabbit-hunters, the leap into ceremonial time is made via their discovery of the 12th-century Persian poem of the title, in which the world’s birds gather to seek out their king. As the poem’s stanzas flow on, their present-tense life is infused with the past; they become Silk Road merchants, desert water-bearers, sainted martyrs. The Conference of the Birds exists within this metamorphosis, capturing its central band of seekers in their plain-clothes reality and at the same time wrapping them in robes of myth." -Jonathan Kieran

A small supermarket somewhere in the American backwoods. The staff come in early, drink coffee and restock the shelves. They chat about the air conditioning, would like to read poetry in peace and sometimes even get lucky on the slot machine.