Few garments carry as much cultural weight as the hoodie. First created in the 1930s by the brand Champion to meet athletes' needs for warmth and durability, the hoodie slowly became a marker of style, anonymity, suspicion, and resistance—often all at the same time. In The Hoodie: Identity, Power, Protest, a new exhibition at the Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA), co-curators Dr. Regina N. Bradley and Dr. Laura Flusche examine the hoodie not just as a piece of clothing, but as a deeply political symbol shaped by race, class, geography, and history within the American South.

The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce the winner of our 2025 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize: Waterfalls by Lois Wolfe.

A review of The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf 2025) by Donika Kelly.

The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce that the winner for the 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize is: Feminine Morbidity by Maya Williams.

There’s so much about Jenny Erlingsson you don’t know. That’s probably because she’s a freshly minted novelist, author of the 2024 contemporary fiction title Her Part to Play. Before the book’s summer 2024 release, you would have needed to travel to Iceland to bump into Erlingsson in person, or you would have needed to be a part of her Milk and Honey collective of women writers.

The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce the finalists for our 2025 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

A discussion between guest fiction editor Mary McMyne and Jennifer Givhan about her new book Salt Bones.

When I wrestle with a first draft of shorter writing—an essay in this case—I take it for a long run. No music, no podcasts, just two hours of nature, water in juice-box-sized bottles, electrolyte gels, and my outline entirely in my head. I have no choice but to write, because I’d rather my thoughts excavate the soil around an essay prompt than draft anxious emails (admittedly, I do take these out for runs, too).

On the whole, evocative and daring, an uneasy dance between the sand and the sea, Strange Beach is an ever-transforming shore, a space of encounter between bodies and meaning, between history and the new.

A pocket is a useful tool for writing because you can carry a pocketknife in it, which is good for sharpening your pencil. The pencil as a tool for writing has never been topped, as far as I know. It is cheap, and it is readily available. It is portable. It doesn't require Wi-Fi, and it doesn't have a noisy fan. It doesn't ask you to take a moment to fill out a brief survey. It doesn't ask you to like it.

As the submission deadline for our 2024-25 Poetry Chapbook Prize draws near, we would like to formally introduce our judge for this year’s contest, Olatunde Osinaike.

This year’s Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, Osinaike is a Nigerian-American poet whose most recent collection, Tender Headed, explores experiences of Blackness and masculinity. The following interview involves questions relating to his experience as an acclaimed poet, his writing process, and advice he has for writers on the rise.