The removal of a PBS news show from Arkansas airwaves and the rescheduling of another has incensed Arkansans after a successful crowdfunding campaign kept PBS programs in the state.

Supporters of the campaign expressed opposition in emails to the network over the decision to remove “Washington Week with The Atlantic” from its schedule and move “PBS NewsHour” from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. on weeknights as of July 1. The Advocate obtained the emails via a public records request.

Viewers told the network they believed the move was ideologically driven, echoing complaints heard earlier this year when Arkansas TV was poised to drop PBS entirely.

“While management has defended these shifts as a financial necessity to pivot toward local content, the targeted reduction of respected, national journalism looks less like a budget decision and more like a deliberate effort to suppress balanced, critical news programming that holds leadership accountable,” one person wrote to Arkansas TV CEO Carlton Wing.

Some people said they felt the programming changes were a misuse of the donations to help fund a year of PBS programs. Others said fears of such removals or changes were why they hadn’t backed the crowdfunding efforts. 

The state’s public television foundation saw an exodus of donors after Arkansas TV Commission moved to cut ties with PBS. The move came at the same time the network rebranded from Arkansas PBS to Arkansas TV.

The network lost more than 3,700 donors from December through February, Arkansas TV Foundation CEO Marge Betley said in March.

Sarah Thompson said she and her husband are longtime donors who continue to support Arkansas TV even after the programming changes. They contributed to the PBS Dues Fund, which the foundation launched in March to collect funds specifically to pay for PBS programs.

The Thompsons drove from Fayetteville to Conway to join dozens of people, including PBS CEO Paula Kerger, urging the Arkansas TV Commission at its March meeting to reconsider leaving PBS.

The network’s decision to pay for PBS programs but change the programming schedule felt “deceptive” and “like somebody pulled the rug,” Thompson said.

“They can say, ‘Well, we didn’t get rid of them, we just rescheduled them,’ and they’ve put them in places that are very inaccessible or inconvenient,” she said.

Thompson still watches PBS NewsHour at its regular time on the PBS Passport app, but she and other Arkansans said moving PBS NewsHour four hours later alienates many older viewers who do not stay up until 10 p.m.

Ruth Hooper, a retired teacher from Little Rock, told the Advocate she found it curious which programs Arkansas TV rescheduled or removed.

“I was concerned that widely-trusted news programs were deemed expendable,” said Hooper, who no longer donates to the network. “Why news programming, of all things?”

Many viewers said Washington Week and PBS NewsHour are unbiased broadcasts and accused Arkansas TV of censoring them.

“This is our best source of televised OBJECTIVE news — I’m sorry that you deem it harmful because it tells the often disastrous truth that is the Trump administration,” one viewer wrote about PBS NewsHour.

‘Big Brother’

Wing said for months that the station could not afford to renew its PBS membership after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lost funding and shut down in 2025. Arkansans from all 75 counties, with the help of some wealthy individual donors, raised more than $2.1 million for PBS dues.

Two former Arkansas first ladies started Friends of Arkansas PBS in February to spearhead the fundraising, and they expressed frustration with the programming changes last month, calling it “just another example of [Arkansas TV] leadership moving the goalposts.”

The Arkansas TV Commission agreed June 12 to use the $2.1 million for its intended purpose, but “the changes are inconsistent with the spirit of remaining affiliated with PBS,” Commissioner Cynthia Nance said in a June 24 email to an individual with questions and concerns.

Nance and Annette Herrington were the only two members of the eight-member commission to vote against cutting ties with PBS. Herrington has since resigned, and another member’s term expired.

Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is expected to appoint two new commissioners in addition to the three she has already appointed: Maria Sullivan, Charlene Fite and Chairman Gary Newton.

Wing and Fite are former Republican state lawmakers, and Fite is running to regain her former seat in Van Buren. Several frustrated viewers mentioned Sullivan’s husband, a Republican state senator who has called Washington’s Week’s coverage “left-leaning.”

“We do not need Big Brother removing shows,” one person wrote.

Sen. Dan Sullivan of Jonesboro told the Advocate that he is “not micromanaging” Arkansas TV and that he believes Wing is “doing a good job” running the network.

Wing said in an email to a viewer that the programming changes were not politically motivated. The station’s goal is to increase the amount of local programming from 5% to 30%, he said.

“Had we placed new programs in the 7-10 p.m. prime hours, the new schedule would have been much more intrusive,” Wing said. “The 6-7 p.m. hour was the only consistent hour available. Moving PBS News Hour to the other traditional news time slot was more natural.”

‘Trust has been broken’

The majority of Arkansas TV’s funding comes from state funds. The agency’s appropriation faced resistance from House Republicans several years in a row until this spring, when some lawmakers praised Arkansas TV’s potential disaffiliation from PBS.

Wing, who resigned from the House of Representatives to become CEO of Arkansas TV in September, has said one of his goals is to prioritize Arkansas-focused programming.

New, locally-made shows that have premiered this year focus on topics ranging from Arkansas history and politics to health and nature. The public affairs show Arkansas Week has also expanded from 30 minutes to one hour.

Viewers said new programming should not come at the expense of national news. One viewer expressed concern that Arkansas TV’s local programming would have a conservative bias due to the network’s many Republican connections.

“We’re tired of being jerked around by politics,” another viewer wrote to the network. “Give us the PBS shows we know and watch!”

Wing has called the schedule changes “minimal,” but many Arkansans disagreed.

“Trust has been broken,” one viewer wrote. “If Carlton Wing said it was raining, I would go outside to check.”

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew DeMillo for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

A former Arkansas high school teacher accused the Russellville School District in a federal lawsuit Wednesday of violating his First Amendment rights when it fired him last year over a post he made on social media alluding to conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s death.

The lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas on behalf of Joshua Duncan, who taught biology at Russellville High School until his termination last fall. It is asking a judge to order the district to reinstate Duncan.

The superintendent of the district, Luke Lovins, said in an email that the district wouldn’t comment on pending litigation.

The complaint filed in federal district court says that Duncan was fired after he posted on his personal Facebook page the day of Kirk’s death a quote attributed to the late criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow, which read: “‘I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.’” 

In addition to the quote, the complaint said, Duncan commented on the post: “‘Just seemed fitting today.’”

The lawsuit is one of several that have been filed in federal courts across the country by Americans who were disciplined or lost their jobs because of comments criticizing or mocking the Turning Point USA founder after he was shot and killed while speaking at a college campus in Utah.

Several public employees who lost their jobs over posts or comments about Kirk have received settlements as a result of those lawsuits. 

Kirk’s death instantly became an online flashpoint in a year that had already seen several acts of political violence, including the assassination and attempted assassination of two Democratic state lawmakers in Minnesota. 

Duncan’s lawsuit says that his Facebook post remained online for less than 12 hours before he decided to delete it, and was only viewable by the roughly 1,200 he was friends with on the platform.

“He deleted the post of his own volition before he went to work and before he knew it had been screenshotted and spread around,” the lawsuit read.

He was ultimately fired by Russellville’s school board on Sept. 25 for violating school policies involving social media, two weeks after being put on administrative leave.

The district’s superintendent, Lovins, “specifically pointed to Mr. Duncan’s post about Charlie Kirk and otherwise made it clear that the post was the reason for the recommended termination,” the complaint said.

Duncan has faced “ongoing harm stemming from his termination” due to difficulties obtaining new, equivalent employment and because of a complaint submitted by Lovins about the post to the Arkansas Department of Education Professional Licensure Standards Board. 

“The ACLU of Arkansas condemns political violence in all forms. There is no place for violence in our democracy,” the organization wrote in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “But the First Amendment protects a wide range of political expression, including speech that others may find controversial or offensive. Government officials cannot punish people for exercising those rights.”

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew DeMillo for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

In poetry, there is something called a volta. Italian for “turn,” a volta is a moment in a poem that marks a sudden change in direction, often revealing the poem’s true meaning to the reader. In Shakespearean sonnets, the volta typically occurs before the final couplet. 

For Arkansas native Bryan Borland, 46, the founder of North Little Rock-based poetry publishing house Sibling Rivalry Press, the volta happened in January 2025, when the Arkansas Choral Director’s Association bowed to political pressure and removed a song with lyrics by trans poet Amir Rabiyah from the All-State Choir audition and performance repertoire, likely due to Rabiyah’s gender identity. 

At the time, Sibling Rivalry Press, started by Borland in 2010 and publishing at a consistent and prolific pace through 2021, had been on indefinite hiatus for four years. But for Borland and Sibling Rivalry, whose stated mission is to champion and platform LGTBQ+ authors and artists from across the country, continued retirement began to feel uneasy. 

Even more so because one of the many books Sibling Rivalry published during the previous decade was Rabiyah’s 2017 collection “Prayers For My 17th Chromosome.” 

“We had published Amir’s first book in 2017,” Borland said. “So I knew Amir. But I wasn’t back in publishing. I’d moved on. I’ve used the term retired sometimes. There was a time that if that would have happened, I would have had a reading and a protest and brought authors here to fight,” Borland said. “Not doing anything felt like a defeat, not true to myself.” 

Borland and his husband, SA Borland, who have run the press together since 2012, were still processing how they wanted to respond and what the future of Sibling Rivalry might look like, when Bryan Borland visited Washington, D.C., bookstore Busboys and Poets a few months later. 

The first thing he saw upon entering the bookstore was a cardboard cutout of Oprah Winfrey and bestselling writer and poet Ocean Voung, who published his debut chapbook “Burning” with Sibling Rivalry in 2010, becoming the press’ inaugural author. Then, he glimpsed a copy of the novel “Martyr” by Kaveh Akbar, another major writer who got his start with Sibling Rivalry.  

“It was this otherworldly thing, it made me very emotional,” Borland said. “I just felt that electricity.” 

Charged with renewed purpose and energy and armed with a $10,000 Catalyze grant from the Windgate Foundation, Borland decided to awaken Sibling Rivalry from its slumber. 

***

Beginning in 2010 with the publication of Vuong’s chapbook, Sibling Rivalry has punched far above its weight class in the poetry world, publishing such acclaimed poets as Akbar, Saeed Jones, Joseph Osmundson and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips, among many other authors both established and emerging. 

“I count myself both lucky and supremely proud to say that my career began in Little Rock, Arkansas, by an even littler publisher called Sibling Rivalry Press,” Vuong wrote in a June 2024 address to a reunion of Sibling Rivalry poets that serves as a forward to Borland’s forthcoming book “Listen, Kid,” out in August via his own press.

Referring to Borland, Vuong writes in praise of “an editor whose vision, generosity, and perennial kindness sees the seed in you long before you realize it,” while placing Sibling Rivalry in a hallowed literary lineage alongside New Directions, City Lights in San Francisco and New York Review Books. 

Watching Borland at a back table at Vino’s Brew Pub in May, drinking pints of beer and eating slices of pizza with his husband and two of Sibling Rivalry’s newest additions to its roster of poets, it’s easy to see what Vuong means.  

Self-deprecatingly pointing to his graying beard as evidence of the grind of small press publishing, Borland is warm and engaging, apt to soliloquize about the power of poetry in a way to which I am usually allergic, but that coming from Borland is genuinely inspiring. His enthusiasm for his authors — poets Toni Garcia-Butler and JC Andrews in this instance — is impossible to hide, with Borland often interjecting praise for their works into our conversation and taking every possible opportunity to extoll the prizes, accolades and virtues of theirs and other Sibling Rivalry poets’ work.

“The only way I know how to critique a poem is to say, ‘That’s beautiful, that line is beautiful, that line made me feel something,’” Borland said. “I don’t know how to critique. And now I’m so fucking glad I don’t know that, because that’s what makes the difference.” 

Borland views his role as an amplifier rather than a gatekeeper, focusing on platforming as wide a variety of voices as possible. As stated on the press’ website, “we wanted our ages to be diverse, our faces to be diverse, and our accents to be diverse.” 

“That’s one of the reasons why Sibling Rivalry has been successful is we’ve kept that door open for anybody that calls themselves a poet,” Borland said. “It can be from the spoken-word world, it can be from the academic world, it can be from the elderly people that get together Saturday mornings at the library.”

***

The reincarnation of Sibling Rivalry is centered on several publishing initiatives, most immediately the quarterly journal Assaracus and the Arkansas Queer Poets Series. 

Originally published from 2011 to 2017, Borland imagines the book-length literary magazine Assaracus as a broad and unapologetic hub for queer poetry publishing.

“I want it to be like walking into a really queer flea market and you walk down an aisle and you find something you like, or there might be something that’s really weird, or there might be something that you absolutely do not like,” Borland said. “You’re gonna get complete diversity of voice, diversity of experience, diversity of the entire LGBTQ spectrum.” 

While Borland usually gives the poets he selects for Assaracus the space and freedom to publish whatever portfolio of their work they choose, he immediately knew the first poem he wanted to publish in the journal’s revival issue: Rabiyah’s “Release,” the lyrics to the song erased from the Arkansas All-State Choir repertoire in early 2025. 

“It was a way to honor Amir that would give me a way to make the wrong that happened to Amir, right, in a way,” Borland said. “I love that now more people than ever would have known about that piece have now read it.” 

In addition to the rebirth of Assaracus and its national roster of poets, Sibling Rivalry is resuming its full-speed-ahead publishing schedule with non-series titles like “Gay Sex” by Charlie Lou Evans and “A Litter of Lists” by Alex Gildzen, both released in June, and its Bridges series, in which a single poet annually curates four books from emerging writers. 

But Sibling Rivalry’s relaunch, both for Assaracus (whose recent and upcoming issues feature Arkansas poets Acie Clark and Kai Coggin, among others) and beyond, is fueled by a focus on amplifying Arkansan voices. 

“The first time around, we did not focus on Arkansas. All our success was outside of Arkansas,” Borland said. “We used Arkansas to get attention because that made us unique, but our authors were from all over. But Arkansas is on fire; Arkansas is doing it.” 

Little Rock poet Toni Garcia-Butler, whose chapbook “DIY Body” is the fourth entry in Sibling Rivalry’s Arkansas Queer Poets Series, sees Arkansas’ conservatism playing a role in why the thriving poetry scene here is often overlooked.  

“We were talking about these places where we’re from, and people would look at these states and look at the politics,” Garcia-Butler said, “and they would never imagine the gold, the depth of what we’re doing, what we’ve built here.” 

JC Andrews’ “Trillion Amber Trumpets,” released in April, and Garcia-Butler’s “DIY Body,” released in June, are Sibling Rivalry’s most recent additions to the Arkansas Queer Poet Series, which began in 2018 with the publishing of Randi Romo’s “Othered.” The two chapbooks represent not only the talent on display from Arkansas poets, but the diversity in style and content. 

Andrews’ chapbook is a stunning collection of clear-eyed poems largely drawing on her time growing up in the Ozarks with striking imagery and lines that stop you in your tracks: “the clean algebra /of the sky,” a teenage girl underneath a smokehouse reckoning with her burgeoning sexuality, the “sound / of lying down / in between / two rows / of corn did not / remember me / the same way / in which / I remember / it which is / young / breathing / and deeply / invisible.” 

“Queerness, especially combined with rurality, is a strange thing,” Andrews said. “Existing within those two things coinciding is just strange, and it’s lonely, but it’s also really rich.” 

Many of the poems in “Trillion Amber Trumpets” also appear in the forthcoming collection “Of An Ilk,” which won the prestigious 2026 Yale Younger Poets Prize, given annually to a poet who has yet to publish a full-length book of poetry. 

Garcia-Butler’s debut “DIY Body” is vibrant, conversational and playful, a collection of poems written over the past decade that colorfully document, as Garcia-Butler puts it, “my own kind of awakening and presence in my body.” 

Through their focus on food, music (especially karaoke) and sex, the poems of “DIY Body” are a document of Garcia-Butler proudly proclaiming the essentiality of his Filipino, Black and trans identities. 

***

The importance of Sibling Rivalry existing within and highlighting Arkansas is made even more potent by the starkness of the contrast between the abundance of queer joy on the pages of its books and the oppressive political environment in which those books are born. 

Just one day after I left Vino’s feeling deeply energized by the conversation I had with those working through Sibling Rivalry to create a more inclusive Arkansas, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared June to be Fidelity Month, focusing on fidelity to “God, family, community and country” and posting a link to a Daily Wire article on her Facebook page which labeled the declaration “counter-programming” to Pride Month. 

“It reminded me (again) that in a red state, simply being LGBTQ+ is an act of civil disobedience,” Borland wrote to me following the declaration. “I can aspire to transcend politics, but that is not a reality when queer people and other minorities are erased, redistricted, bullied and attacked by those in power.” 

Garcia-Butler described the inability to disentangle art and politics for queer and marginalized people. “I can write a poem about Spam, and it’s going to be political in some way,” he said. “In this era of renewed mass censorship and erasure, to create from your own experience is a political, revolutionary act in and of itself.” 

The power of this revolutionary act of queer visibility as fostered by Sibling Rivalry is a refrain among its authors. Caroline Earleywine, whose excellent chapbook “Lesbian Fashion Struggles” was published by Sibling Rivalry in 2020, said that “This Assignment Is So Gay,” a 2013 Sibling Rivalry anthology of LGBTQ+ poets on the art of teaching, had a profound effect on her far before the press put out her work. 

“I was a closeted teacher at the time feeling isolated and alone, and all of a sudden I had in my hands reflections of my experience,” Earleywine said. “That’s the magic of the press, and why we are so lucky to have them here in Arkansas.” 

For Borland, it is those types of interactions that provide the motivation to keep Sibling Rivalry active. 

“You can’t squander opportunities to lift other people up,” Borland said. “We all have this opportunity: If something you do gets somebody to their next day, you may never know it. You may never know the impact on somebody, but if you help somebody get to their next day … damn. Not much more than that.” 

And, as Borland points out, inane proclamations like that of Sanders and other bigoted Arkansans only fuels the creation of more and more outstanding art. Much of which, luckily for Arkansas and the wider literary world, Sibling Rivalry plans to publish in the years to come. 

“Anytime you push art down, anytime you push poetry down, anytime you try to silence, or sit, or censor or tell people what they can and can’t say,” Borland said, “that’s when it turns punk, that’s when it rises, that’s when it gets exciting.”