On Art, Voting, and Taking Action Beyond Both

me and SMP as Secret Rivers, performing earlier this year at Indigenous Roots

Welcome to Fall. A few quick personal updates, ending with my thoughts on the upcoming midterm elections.

New Draft (and Video) of “Let Your Heart Be a Whistle”

A poem I wrote in late 2025 and performed a lot throughout this year. Related: check out my list of even more poems from MN poets addressing ICE and the surge.

A Poem of Mine is in the “Witness: Poems to Address the Past, Present, and Future of Policing” Anthology

Aside from my own (new) poem, this remarkable anthology (edited by Ari Tison and Ty Chapman, featuring art by Damon Davis) includes work from big names like Amanda Gorman, Ada Limón, Danez Smith, and Jason Reynolds, alongside locals and personal favorites like Junauda Petrus, Ollie Schminkey, Bao Phi, Kao Kalia Yang, and so many more. Get it here or wherever you get books.

KTM holding up witness anthology, a stack of zines, a cat — *"Witness" anthology, zine bundle, early voting cat*

Zines! Three Quick Notes:

I made a new zine: Less A, More I: a zine on the importance of thinking critically about AI.
You can get a special bundle of (some of ) my zines at Inkwell Booksellers in Minneapolis.
To spotlight an older zine of mine, since I’ve been giving out a ton of them this year, check out How Do We Build a Culture of Consent?, full of recommended reading, links and resources on understanding consent not just as an individual practice, but as a collective responsibility. On that note, my recommended reading page also shares three good pieces on Cornell and the work ahead.

A New Resource: On Voting (and Taking Action Beyond Voting), Especially for Those of Us Who Are Cynical

This new resource features: (1) Some useful how-to links for people who are either new to voting, or returning after some time away; (2) Some resources on "finding a political home" and committing to the work that needs to be done no matter who wins the election; (3) Some quotes from people smarter than me that have shaped my thoughts on the importance of elections, even as someone with no particular love for the opposition party. If you're cynical, or justifiably suspicious of all politicians and parties, I offer these quotes as food for thought.

On that note, I have a somewhat famous (infamous?) poem about why I think voting matters. I wrote it in 2020; it went viral in 2022, and continues to be shared. If you haven't seen it, or you have but didn't know it was mine, check it out. Once again, the links to all this stuff is in here.

A Personal Note: From Minneapolis, From a Neighbor.

I'll take a page out of Ollie's book (and their excellent newsletter) and end this big list of points with a personal thought.

The title of this newsletter is "on art, voting, and taking action beyond both." All year, I've been facilitating workshops on how artists meaningfully supported the organizing and community defense work that happened here in Minnesota during the surge. A big takeaway from those sessions: We need more than art, but we do need art. It's not an either/or, like "you can write a poem OR you can do mutual aid;" it's about finding spaces of synergy, creating opportunities for culture work to "live" in the world. It's very much a both/and.

This is, in some ways, also how I think about voting. It's not enough, but it matters. Let me zoom in for a moment.

I live in Minneapolis. My congressional rep is Ilhan Omar.

If you haven’t seen the news, Trump is going after Rep. Omar, after months/years of going after Somalis in Minnesota. And when I say “going after,” I mean both concrete policy/action that makes life worse for people, for families, for children, and rhetoric that I won’t repeat here, but is the most basic, gutter bigotry, language that is absolutely meant to incite violence.

Maybe it's easy these days to let his garbled rambling fly by; he’s been saying completely off-the-wall racist stuff for a decade now, and responding to every new outrage here wouldn’t be useful. But I do think we lose something when we become used to it. Because it's bigger than just him.

For anyone who needs to hear this: Especially during election season, make note of those who want to blame all our problems on immigrants and refugees, on trans kids, on poor people. It's the oldest trick: they scapegoat those with less power in order to protect their own.

They want us to be furious at everyone but them, the people who could actually help us, because they don’t want to help us. They see everything as zero sum: if we get more, they get less. So they try to convince us: if some immigrant somewhere gets more, we get less. It’s the worldview of sheltered, entitled children, completely at odds with how the economy actually works.

Minnesota is my home. I have nothing but love and respect for my Somali neighbors, my immigrant neighbors, my trans neighbors, my struggling neighbors, all my neighbors. They understand courage and community in ways the corrupt president and his enablers never will (don't take it from me: read Minnesota Diary: Notes from a Somali Mother During ICE’s Winter Invasion).

The work ahead of us is much bigger than a single election. But I’m writing this in October. So while the all-the-time work is to plug in, find a political home, find ways to join or support ongoing efforts to build a better world, the right-now work is to make a plan to vote.

Talking about elections in the US is always fraught, because every race is both super local and super national at the same time, and there are definitely going to be individual people who are unable to vote for individual candidates for a variety of both tactical and values-based reasons. And I don't think it's worth anyone's time to shout at those people.

But one of the reasons that I believe in voting as a tool, in a larger, general sense, is its narrative function. Yes, voting against the fascists isn't going to magically stop them. But if they are crushed at the ballot box this year, that will tell a story: We are not buying what they're selling. We are not afraid of our neighbors, because we are not cowards like the fascists are. Trump, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk—no matter how hard they try, they can't just buy or bully us into submission.

We can argue about whether that story has value on its own, but my position is that it opens up more doors and invites more people into the all-the-time work: organizing, culture-shaping, community-building. It creates space for offensive, not just defensive, activism. It reminds people that they are not alone, that we can win.

And then, whatever happens on election day, the work goes on. We get out of an election what we can get out of it, and then continue fighting for what we can't. Find a political home. Keep pushing back. Lots more on that here. Thanks again for reading.