The Eclipse, by Viktor Ash. This wall painting at Urban Spree Berlin was part of a pop-up exhibition to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Ash’s Astronaut /Cosmonaut…
Essays
A monument to Don Quixote in Tandil, Argentina. Photo: Carlos Barengo/Pixabay China is so peculiarly revealing in its essence that few authors can approach it without unveiling their inn…
Still from Still Tomorrow (2016), dir. Jian Fan, produced by Youku Tudou, Inc. She is a subsistence farmer with a ninth-grade education and a disabled person with speec…
left Claribel Alegría, 1953. right Flakoll-Alegría family, 1959. Left to right: Patricia, Erik, Claribel, Karen, Maya, Bud. Photos used by permission of Er…
photo: three-shots/pixabay As readers, we all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I refuse to…
Editorial note: This sidebar appears with Erik Gleibermann’s essay “Inside the Bilingual Writer” in the same issue M arlon James’s use of Jamaican Patois in his 2015 Booker Prize–winning nove…
Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, Esmeralda Santiago, and Gary Shteyngart. Illustration by Jen Rickard Blair Through a series of interviews, E…
Bonifacio Global City, Manila, 2015. photo: jason reblando In 2015, while on a Fulbright research fellowship in the Philippines, I went on a walking tour of Intramuros, the famed walled city in Mani…
The missing persons bulletin board at Navotas City Police Station in Metro Manila, June 2017. Photo courtesy of the author Do so many opportunities to bear witness only create opportuniti…
photos: shevaun williams & associates After being visibly moved by dance adaptations of four of her poems, Dr. Nelson delivered the following keynote to the packed audience in attendance, wh…
A statue of a young Carver at the George Washington Carver National Monument. photo: jinx!/flickr Hayan Charara, a poet, editor, essayist, and children’s book author, nominated Marilyn Nelson for…
The Seer, by Maia Cruz Palileo A writer undergoes a transformation while overcoming a series of obstacles as she works to reunite her mother with her mother’s siblings in the Philippine…
Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the dif…
illustration: jen rickard blair On the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps ev…
Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret Benzet Returning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its sur…
The kultrún is the quintessential Mapuche instrument. A drum of carved wood and animal hide, it is traditionally played by a machi, or Mapuche shaman, during rituals and celebrations. Althou…
Jaume Plensa’s Tolerance statue and Rosemont Pedestrian Bridge, Houston, Texas / Photo by Patrick Feller If a profligate comes to you with news, make sure you understand it…
Photo: Daniel Tellman / Flickr Societies venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change t…
An old Japanese maple in the Japanese garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis / Photo by Kent Burgess thewaysofthegarden.squarespace.com In this brief essay, poet and translator H. L.…
Photo by C. P. Ewing / Flickr Rumi remains the most popular poet in America today. To many who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” his poems represent direct spiritual connection with a h…
Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967, Italy), Androgynous, 2016, oil, gold leaf on linen, 50x40cm. Courtesy of the artist. Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural forc…
Photo: Fardo Dopstra (Fardodopstra.com) The tradition of toast-giving has followed my family through centuries and continents. This essay tells the tale of one family’s survival and the toasts—po…
Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Taking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the f…
Photo: Miami Herald / Getty For some years, Enrique Ferrari, known in Buenos Aires as Kike (kee-Kay), lived in the United States. His stay ended the day a traffic cop asked him for his pa…
Photo: Jason Devaun The binaries of life bite at 3 a.m.You don’t need to fast-forward time.Envision vanishing before it happens.For those who care to…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
