Emily Colucci

2 weeks ago | filthydreams.org | Emily Colucci

Two deer stare, stunned, their ears perked nervously straight up. Their sweet brown eyes have turned zombie white, caught in a camera flash rather than the headlights of a speeding Ford F-150 barreling down a dirty back road at night. One looks like she’s about to bolt, her body tensed in the tall grasses in desperate need of a mow. The other appears calmer as if she’s seen this before. Further in the distance, a third deer is only perceptible by its floating eyeballs glowing in the dark.

4 weeks ago | filthydreams.org | Emily Colucci

An operatic soprano, introduced by the night’s chirpy emcee duo as Haolan Geng, took the stage at the tony David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, accompanied by only a young woman pianist in a floor-length black gown. Geng’s precise, soaring vocals belonged at the Metropolitan Opera House just across the way as she bellowed a song with its translation projected behind her on a gigantic screen.

4 weeks ago | publishersweekly.com | Emily Colucci

The biographer’s Joy Goddess (Scribner, June) explores the life and times of her great-grandmother A’Lelia Walker, the daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and heiress to the Walker hair care fortune. How did you first become interested in A’Lelia’s story? When I was in high school and first discovering Black authors, I found books on the shelf at home that had belonged to A’Lelia Walker during the 1920s: Langston Hughes’s The Weary Blues, Countee Cullen’s Color, and others.

1 month ago | filthydreams.org | Emily Colucci

Nightlife photography should be kinda bad. Technical perfection is for shut-ins with a studio or all those photographers making photographs of photographs. Nightlife photos should be out of focus and crappily framed. Heads should be lopped right off dancing bodies, fixating instead on torsos bumping and grinding into each other (and the photographer). Flashes of over-lit limbs should cut into the image at odd angles as people slide by to get to the bar.

1 month ago | filthydreams.org | Emily Colucci

Trump is the master of the image. I know—I’m not the only one to point it out. LA Review of Books’ Gideon Jacobs did it before, whose perfectly titled essay “Trump l’Oeil” grabbed me, up until he used the word “ontology” in an essay about Donald Trump. But at this point, isn’t it a cliché to even proclaim Trump the master of the image? I mean, obviously.