Robert Huddleston is a poet, a translator, an essayist, and a lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He grew up in Washington, DC, and West Africa and studied at Dartmouth College, the University of London, and the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in comparative literature. He is coauthor, with Alexandra Huddleston, of the collaborative artists’ books Lost Things and Amor Fati.

Photograph by Aurélie Coudière.

History Lessons

by Robert Huddleston

I didn’t think of it until we were on Meeting Street
and saw the sign: Historic Fort Sumter.
Charleston—the cradle of the Civil War.

How could I have forgotten?
But it compelled us like a document
we’d signed. We knew we had to go.
People on couch
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