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…
Essays
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…
Nancy Eiesland. Photo Courtesy of Candler School of Theology/Emory University A writer remembers Nancy Eiesland, the disabled, feminist theologian whose work became a beacon for her. In the…
PHoto: Michal Venera As one of the original Alcatraz activists in 1969, Dr. Dean Chavers credits the occupation for much of the subsequent sea change in federal Indian policy. The following is t…
Yatika Fields (Osage, Cherokee, Creek), White Buffalo Calf Woman March, oil on canvas, 2017, Hood Museum collection for my always engaged father, who passed at the VA in Norman, Oklahoma…
Pink Montanelli derivative work by Jen Rickard Blair. Original Photo: Jean-Marc Linder / Flickr An Italian-born Somali writer confronts Italy’s colonial past, beginning with an Italian j…
Photo: Azteca Stadium during 1986 World Cup in Mexico/ wikimedia In 1980s Mexico, boys clash off-field during the 1986 FIFA World Cup. Back then, my father worked installing aluminum parts;…
Left: Patricia Jacas as Alisa. Photo © Jose Luis Laborda. Middle: Jorge Ferrer with Svetlana Alexievich. Right: Lizard photo by Thomas Helbig/Flickr A Cuban writer, having lived in Soviet-era Mos…
Photo: Viktor Dobai / Flickr In 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, the author’s current book-length project (in progress), Edward Hirsch offers short essays on poems he finds especially hear…
One of my favorite recent maxims about becoming better stewards of the earth is this one from waste-minimizing chef Anne-Marie Bonneau: “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. W…
Photo: Stuart Lime Digital In a series of vignettes, essayist Chris Arthur considers why “respecting what gives life is not a lesson to be learned indoors.” In E. M. Forster’s A Room wit…
A photography installation from Dinh Q. Lê’s exhibit True Journey Is Return at the San Jose Museum of Art. Photo: Sharon Mollerus Not far from where I live now, a kilometer or so, there’s th…
Isla (la otra orilla), 2013, by Cuban artist Yoan Capote. Oil, fish-hooks, and nails on panel of canvas and plywood, 104 x 154 x 8 cm Through conversations with several translators, Va…
Illustration by Yang (see footnote) AS THE YEARS GO BY and I get more advanced in age, I find I have become increasingly self-aware. It’s hardly an astonishing revelation, of course,…
PHOTO: Andrea Moroni, Patmos / Flickr Only travel can teach us anything. Only travel can move us out of our staid lives into a fresh perspective, to see before us what has not been before us. It is t…
PHOTO: WakingPhotoLife/Flickr Infiltrating Hong Kong’s noodle stalls, Lian-Hee Wee investigates the quick, mysterious writing used by waiters on order slips. Nobody knows I’m a fraud. No on…
PHOTO: Rikki Chan/Unsplash Now settled in Hong Kong, one of China’s most influential contemporary writers considers the city’s cultural positioning and how to improve its cultural ecology. When a…
Light-damaged photograph of a man sifting through salt at the mines in Bilma, Niger. PHOTO: Ladan Osman In this lyrical introduction to her Alien Citizen Field Notes project, Ladan Osman challeng…
LEFT The abandoned frame of a sedan. Car frames offer shade and serve as markers of graves as well as failed journeys. RIGHT Vehicles pause during the hottest hours to avoid stressing the m…
A former driver of migrants holds a peacock feather during his interview in Dirkou. PHOTO: Ladan Osman Traveling on to Dirkou, long a respite town on the desert road to and from Libya, and then…
PHOTO: Jen Rickard Blair After translating more than two hundred titles into Spanish and Catalan, Carles Andreu focuses on his translations of Jennifer Egan’s work to consider the role of intuiti…
Spiegel by Jaume Plensa at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, United Kingdom. PHOTO: puffin11k/Flickr Can contemporary reading methods catch up with the proliferation of and innovation in mult…
PHOTO: Alexandru Acea/Unsplash Reviewing Ma Jian’s three-decades-long career, Elizabeth Fifer traces the banned and exiled Chinese writer’s deepening critique. A newly translated work of fic…
