Camp de la Transportation in French Guiana. Photo: Rodolphe HammadiIn this excerpt from French Guiana: Memory-Traces of the Penal Colony, Chamoiseau explores the possibilities of rewritin…
Essays
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Photo: Maged/FlickrThroughout its 2,500-year history, irrespective of whether it was a Carthaginian colony, a Roman provincial capital, a Portuguese colony, an English naval outpost, or a Moroccan…
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Releasing the Truth, mixed media on canvas by Florine Démosthène. Courtesy of the artist. What is this sense of dislocation? Do others have it? A wandering writer explores displacement o…
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A scene from the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Satyagraha. Photo: Ken Howard/Courtesy of LA Opera During a 1969 trip to India, composer Philip Glass was compelled to learn…
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The O-Töne literary festival brings hundreds of people to the central square of MuseumsQuartier. Photo courtesy of O-Töne. At the new Literaturmuseum, nestled in a historic building on Johannesgasse…
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Photo: Matan Eldar Israel and Lebanon, Hebrew and Arabic—so close, yet so far away. I'm driving down the coastal road, flashes of bright blue sea, glimmering gold and silver in…
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Tatiana Oroño and the musician Daniel Petruchelli, who set her poem “Elogio del camino” to music, taken at a performance at the Casa de los escritores (House of Writers) in Montevideo / Photos by Mar…
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Photo: Amelia Curran. © Six Shooter Records Is Canadian singer-songwriter Amelia Curran a mix of Leonard Cohen and Patsy Cline? A juggler of Robert Frost’s poems? Andrew DuBois considers her art…
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Inside the Fendika Cultural Center that houses the artists’ rehearsal space. All Photos (except where noted): Eric Ellingsen “Poetry is not a form, but rather a result.” –Amiri Baraka In front…
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An overgrown yard at a factory where statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders used to be made. Photo: Philip Metres In the Den of the Voice” is part of The More You Love the Motherland,…
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Photo: A still from “This is America” by Childish Gambino Poet Ladan Osman considers how Childish Gambino obliterates rooted acts of black optimism and expression, leading us to underst…
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Photo: Shevaun Williams & Associates After watching the dance adaptation of her story “Sand” at the 2018 Puterbaugh Festival, Erpenbeck delivered the following keynote, in which she…
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This year’s fiftieth-anniversary Puterbaugh Festival of International Literature & Culture set a new high-water mark in the cultural life of the University of Oklahoma, in a series already distin…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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left Claribel Alegría, 1953. right Flakoll-Alegría family, 1959. Left to right: Patricia, Erik, Claribel, Karen, Maya, Bud. Photos used by permission of Er…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…