Visiting American Prophets

 

Visiting American Prophets: Anticipation

Later this autumn, I will travel to Chicago to visit the American Writers Museum. Their upcoming exhibit, American Prophets: Writers, Religion, and Culture, gathers those whose work has traced the numinous in American life. These are writers who reach beyond doctrine to reveal the divine in story and the extraordinary in the ordinary. They also search out the questions that live beneath belief. Among them is Rachel Pollack.

To see her name among such voices stirs awe. Rachel’s presence feels both inevitable and astonishing. She translated mysteries through Tarot, myth, and human transformation, making the invisible tangible. Her fiction and essays combined scholarly precision with imaginative daring, expanding literature’s scope. She insisted that curiosity and wonder belong in serious discourse and believed the spiritual resides within each of us. For her, the strange was often our truest mirror.

When I think of her as an American Prophet, I see her work in dialogue with other seekers. Baldwin’s moral clarity and his Christian language exploring queer spirituality come to mind. I recall the mythic worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin and N. K. Jemisin, and the visionary tension of Flannery O’Connor. I’m also reminded of Matthew Kirby’s luminous search, his atmospheric stories exploring truth and identity in mystery and history. Still, Rachel’s voice is distinct. Her spiritual imagination was not nostalgic or ornamental; it was revelatory. She spoke to the lived experience of belief, showing its ecstasies and wounds, and revealing its power to rebuild identity from within.

Her inclusion feels personal. I knew Rachel as a mentor and friend, her curiosity inseparable from her kindness. Her work reminds me that story is a living practice and that the sacred is not elsewhere but near, waiting to be seen. 

It humbles me to know that a small piece of my writing about Rachel will live within that space. I can almost hear her laugh at the symmetry of it all. That bright, knowing laugh dissolved any sense of hierarchy, placing us on the same field of discovery. If she were here, she would tell me to take it in fully and urge me to let the amazement be real.

Standing there, I imagine I will feel the familiar tug between awe and disbelief. That is the same tension she taught me to hold with grace. In that moment, surrounded by the words of so many who have sought meaning through story, I will think of her voice rising among them. It will be sure and clear, reminding me that revelation is rarely grand. It happens quietly, in the rooms where we finally recognize we belong.

Learn more about the American Writers Museum: https://americanwritersmuseum.org/