Photo: José Arturo Ballester Panelli
The state of emergency is the exception, the overturned routine, the searing pause, the lost tranquility. You might think that it is just a readjustment of daily…
Essays
Photo: Luis G. Collao When police are blinding protestors on Chile’s streets, eyes like poet Elvira Hernández’s become more important than ever. As I write this, Chile is burning. The street…
Illustration: Jen Rickard Blair Scuba-diving in the Black Sea, a writer contemplates Lenin in the Crimean seabed, the watery landfall from which historical figures are never meant to rise again. …
photo: Cristian / Flickr A writer traces how the murder of George Floyd is continuing to arouse people in cities everywhere, including her own mother in Martinique. Sa ki ta la rivyè pa…
Photo: Quarantine portrait. Tulsa, Oklahoma. March 22, 2020, by Joseph Rushmore A writer of historical fiction, located in the US heartland, considers the pandemic’s languid creep and an…
Sunset in Queens, New York, May 5, 2020. Photo: Jay Santiago / Flickr In isolation, a writer connects her mother’s attempt to protect her from “never-being-able-to-leave-Cuba-itis” to her own des…
The Greek government announced plans to reopen the vital tourism sector as the country is likely to suffer the worst recession in the European Union this year. Photo: Gianni Skaragas In Greece, a…
Honeycomb Photo: Shilo Labelle / Unsplash, bee photo: Ante Hamersmit / Unsplash, Spoon photo: Jen Blair In quarantine in South Beach, Miami, a writer looks to literature—and bees—while contempla…
An Iranian detainee hangs up her laundry on the fence at the Construction camp detention center used for younger men and women and children. February 26, 2012, on Christmas Island, Australia. Photo:…
Photo: Quinn Makabe played by Thapelo Mokoena in the TV drama of Trackers by Deon Meyer Encountering postapartheid Afrikaans fiction for the first time, particularly the fast-paced crim…
Photo: Rene Böhmer / Unsplash A polyhedron of blond leather. Thirty-two by seventeen by twelve. Solid handle, brass hooks, wide belt, reinforced external corners, hand-sewn. Inside, top, a striped bl…
Left to right: Ayobami Adebayo, Chigozie Obioma, and Romeo Oriogun Three millennial writers probe inner male conflict while the patriarch Achebe looks on. A man lays his head on his…
Relief at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Photo: Clare_and_ben / flickr Standing before a museum exhibit of a mummified five-year-old “Purchased in Egypt in 1895,” a father h…
After watching the world-premiere dance adaptations of her poems from The Surrender Tree, Engle delivered the following keynote to the packed audience in attendance, which included sever…
Photo: Shevaun Williams Lilliam Rivera served on the jury that chose the 2019 NSK Prize winner and successfully championed Margarita Engle as her nominee. On the first day of the 2019 Neustadt Li…
A monument to poet Adam Mickiewicz. Photo: Jutta M. Jenning / Flickr A couple finds their hired tour guide more sage for hire—like Socrates, an ambulatory pedagogue. I saw him first from the…
A woman runs with a purple smoke bomb during a protest against sexual abuse of women on August 16, 2019, in Mexico City. Photo: Cristopher Rogel Blanquet/Getty Images Though the feminist response…
ARShAT performing a Transforma. Photo: Ruslan Yakupov Traveling across central Asia, Nicholas Pritchard discovers musical acts of dissent in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Our problems have now risen t…
Basque poet and bertsolari winner Maialen Lujanbio during the 2017 Bertsolari Grand Championship. Photo: Dani Blanco / Wikimedia In Basque and other minority-language traditions in Europ…
Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest, Hungary. Photo: Daniel Olah / Unsplash Sometime in the mid-1980s, at the first conference of the European Association of American Studies held behind the Iron Curtai…
Kaninekahake – People of the Flint, fabric collage with acrylic on board, by Alex Jacobs, 2006, private collection, Santa Fe, NM. Image courtesy of Alex Jacobs There is a field. We don’t qu…
Photo: Ronnie Brenes Anger is a tool, and like a hammer, it can build a house or tear one down. Sometimes you need it to do both. Marching down Michigan Avenue, the crowd blocked traffic. We…
Collage Mural by Melanie Cervantes, Jesus Barraza, and Lianne Charlie. Photo by Maxime Faure. I’m just a human being trying to make it in a world that is rapidly losing its understanding of being…
Photo: Júbilo Haku / Flickr A series of troubling questions leads a child of immigrants to write a novel imagining a young Mexican mother deported, leaving her half-American, California-born daug…
The endangered Serianthes nelsonii sapling on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. More than forty of the endangered tree species saplings were planted around Andersen by biologists from the…
