Hi guys, I have a story out—my first in two years! I'm so excited to share it with you all. It's an experimental fiction piece about a world where suddenly people's sins began to play over their heads in a hologram. It is published on @Iskanchipress iskanchi.com/magazine-posts/…

Only a few days left to enter for the $2000 poetry prize. Submit 💫

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

This fall, Mustapha Enesi (@Eneessi) will be heading to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) to begin a fully funded MFA in Fiction. To make this transition possible by his June deadline, a GoFundMe has been launched to cover the final logistical hurdles—specifically his SEVIS fee, visa, and airfare. Kindly make support his studies by making donations through the link below or sending a direct message to him @Eneessi. Donation link: gofundme.com/f/help-me-get-t… #creativewriting #fiction #gofundme #mustaphaenesi

—Gregory Orr

Woke up to this amazing news. I made THE @poetrywales Award shortlist, y’all. I’m sooooooooo excited 💃🏿💃🏿💃🏿

please, take a minute or two of your day to vote for Christtie Jay’s poem as IS&T's April 2026 Poem of the Month surveymonkey.com/r/KYQKQ5W

yo, Nigerian & global writers/creative community. my stage name is Blacc, otherwise known by my government name ‘Qudus Olowo.’ a Nigerian writer, editor, rapper, singer, & songwriter. i will be dropping my single ‘Dopamine’ this coming Friday, May 15. and I will need your support

Meet Timi Sanni✨ We’re spotlighting voices that move us and Timi is one of them. ✅ He’s one of five incredible poets featured at the APBF Reading 2026. Join us on 17th May, 2026 for an evening where poetry speaks, stirs, and stays with you long after the last line.

overwhelmed and flattered that my poem in New Poetry Canada has gotten almost 11,000 likes on Instagram

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

Fatima Aamer Bilal, "i mother it the absence of her"

Somehow this favorite poem by June Jordan keeps getting better and more relevant

What is #MuslimPit? Muslim Pit is a pitch event designed to uplift Muslim writers who are at any stage of their manuscript. It is designed to spotlight the many cultures and identities that make up the Islamic faith. WHAT ARE YOU PITCHING? 🌙

An artist named Monica Raven made this with my poem "Instructions for Having a Soul," and I love it so much. ❤️

One of the best critics Nigeria could have is @Isaiah_Adepoju_, but someone needs to prod him into some serious work. His criticism is sturdy and balanced (it's very much on the same level with Ancci, if not more). But I want him to be prolific. My nigga is lazy. 🤧

随分前に買った傘 使わずに放って置いた 何となく使ってみて 乾かして、ふっと、見たら 雨粒が花になっていた

I will never, ever get over this email.

Honored that one of my new manuscripts has been named a finalist in the Dorset Prize contest. Onward!