Photo by Beowulf Sheehan / Courtesy of www.tayarijones.com Tayari Jones is a New York Times best-selling author from Atlanta, Georgia. Her most recent novel, An American Marriage, w…

What defines a moment, a movement? The cause or the people who defend it? Too often both are overshadowed by chaos, destruction, and misdirection. John Willis’s Mni Wiconi / Water Is Lif…

In 2012, at sixteen years old, Joshua Wong and the pro-democracy student group he founded took on the Hong Kong government, mobilized more than one hundred thousand student protesters, and surpri…

Photo by Ervins Strauhmanis / Flickr 1 We maintain antiquity and elegance on paper; inside we are full of shame. We present heaven and hell on paper; our self-disgust results from…

Photo by Teemu008 / Flickr When Juan de Ayala passed through the Golden Gate on August 5, 1775, he didn’t see a Morus bassanus, un Fou de Bassan, or un Alcatrace from…

Photo by klaxtonphoto / Flickr aya, Wesley Leonard weenswiaani. niila myaamia. As a linguist, citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and participant for many years in my community’s efforts to learn…

Alex Jacobs, Tribal Voice – John Trudell (11 x 14 fabric collage on board), courtesy of the artist The best description of America was made some five hundred years ago: “If it didn’t exist, we’d…

Photo by James St. John / Flickr Fences I will never think of this in the same way, watching the woman in her daily brown skirt throw her own body against the fence and try to cli…

Dorothy Wang of Williams College, Ammiel Alcalay of the Graduate Center City University of New York (CUNY), and Sesshu Foster at the CUNY Graduate Center, March 27, 2018 / Photo courtesy of the autho…

Photo by Bryan Kuwada Aunty says She climbed a ninety-foot cliff in the dark Traced the scars of a long-forgotten waterfall Cried as she felt the green disappearing under her fingertips And I lea…

Photo collage courtesy of the author El Matador             after Argentina’s World Cup Victory in 1978 La Patria comes dressed in multiple costumes, during the “…

Perfecto Santiago / Courtesy of the author Culebra, Puerto Rico, 2018 Let us sit in the open air where days I work, my hands shaping a small plane out of sticks. I tell you only what I li…

“Unmarked Grave of Toypurina: Mission San Juan Bautista,” from When Rivers Were Trails, Indian Land Tenure Foundation through MSU, 2018, by Weshoyot Alvitre / Courtesy of the artist If you didn’t gro…

Diane Zephier / Courtesy of the author There are maps of “Points of Interest” or landmarks tourists visit every summer dotted across the prairies of Sioux country. Landmarks on maps detail where Cust…

Elder Crosslin Smith holds heirloom Cherokee corn (selu) grown by tribal staff for a group activity on traditional cooking / Photo by Nancy Rackliff For Indigenous peoples, the political is environme…

after Ai Wei Wei, Michael Lujan Bevacqua, and various documents of protest by Indigenous dissidents1,2    

Photo by Mimi Di Cianni on Unsplash There is a Red Barn Ice Cream shop near Watertown in upstate New York. There, in the middle of nowhere, was ice cream with real fruit, whole strawberries in a sing…

Earlier this summer, the editors of WLT invited more than two dozen writers to nominate one book, published since 1969, that most influenced their extraliterary commi…

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Current (2005), acrylic on steel, 18 x 18 in, part of the Greater Vehicle series The innovator isn’t important. It’s whoever has the watershed moment.…