Camille Zakharia’s tri-part Elusive Homelands, documented in this issue of Blackbird's Gallery, was on display at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Doha, Qatar campus October 4 through November 8, 2006. Interviewed by contributing editor Jeff Lodge, Zakharia discusses how his own displacement, and the unlikely prospect of immigrants returning home, informs his paintings and photo-collages.

Red Guitar, a column by poet and critic Ron Smith, resumes in this issue with “The Only Emperor.”
This June 1, 2007 Feature has also been linked under Nonfiction. Previous Red Guitar columns “Beyond Irony” and “Larkin’s Eggs” appear in Blackbird v4n2 and v5n1, respectively. Links to these previous columns can be found at the footer of this issue’s column.

Each spring we bring your attention to writers and visual artists whose work you may be encountering for the first time. This group includes contributors who have already made their way to lists and anthologies acclaiming their remarkable work. We expect that you will be glad to discover them now—and to hear of them again later in their careers, as you no doubt will.