Essays

Storytelling as Activism

By Emily Rapp Black

Autumn 2019
Emily Rapp Black

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. ...
Alcatraz Is Not an Island

By Dean Chavers

Autumn 2019
Dean Chavers

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 followi...
An Active Measure

By Allison Hedge Coke

Autumn 2019
Allison Hedge Coke

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, O...
Not One Less

By Igiaba Scego

Autumn 2019
Igiaba Scego

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 It...
Say “Thank You”

By Emiliano Monge

Autumn 2019
Emiliano Monge

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...
A Date with Svetlana Alexievich in Berlin: or, Smuggling Bugs into Soviet Moscow

By Jorge Ferrer

Autumn 2019
Jorge Ferrer

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-...
The Poetry of Heartbreak: Miklós Radnóti’s “The Fifth Eclogue”

By Edward Hirsch

Autumn 2019
Edward Hirsch

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 especial...
Bearing Witness to Climate Change: 9 Artists Making an Impact

By Jen Rickard Blair

Summer 2019
Jen Rickard Blair

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...
Escaping Indoors

By Chris Arthur

Summer 2019
Chris Arthur

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 R...
Living in the Tenses in Saigon

By Andrew Lam

Summer 2019
Andrew Lam

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, the...
Carrying a People Across a Watery Divide: Translating Cuba in the Twenty-First Century

By Vanessa Garcia

Summer 2019
Vanessa Garcia

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 translat...
Hong Kong’s Table Talks

By Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Spring 2019
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

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...
To Write from a Place of Permanent Exile

By Nicholas Samaras

Spring 2019
Nicholas Samaras

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....
Hong Kong Food Runes

By Lian-Hee Wee

Spring 2019
Lian-Hee Wee

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...
Dwelling Poetically in Hong Kong

By Bei Dao

Spring 2019
Bei Dao

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....
Alien Citizen Field Notes: An Introduction

By Ladan Osman

Spring 2019
Ladan Osman

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 c...
“And Leaving from the Crowded City”

By Ladan Osman

Spring 2019
Ladan Osman

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 t...
Landscape Vertigo

By Ladan Osman

Spring 2019
Ladan Osman

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, an...
The Role of Intuition in Translation

By Carles Andreu

Spring 2019
Carles Andreu

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...
Reading Multilingual Arab Literatures Globally in the Twenty-First Century

By Syrine Hout

Spring 2019
Syrine Hout

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...
Love and Sexuality in the Fallen World of Ma Jian

By Elizabeth Fifer

Spring 2019
Elizabeth Fifer

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...
“All Geography Is Within Me”: Writing Beginnings, Life, Death, Freedom, and Salt

By Edwidge Danticat

Winter 2019
Edwidge Danticat

Following the performances of two Haitian-inspired dances at the 2018 festival, Danticat delivered the following keynote to the audience of several hundred in attendance. 1 This past June I w...
“Stretching the Limits of Silence”: Witness and Resistance in Edwidge Danticat’s Nonfiction

By Renee H. Shea

Winter 2019
Renee H. Shea

Photo: Parth Upadhyay/Unsplash Reflecting back over Edwidge Danticat’s nonfiction, Renee H. Shea finds much to be grateful for in Danticat’s extension of her personal stories into political and...
Met Fanm Sou Ou

By Marie Casimir

Winter 2019
Marie Casimir

OU School of Dance students performing Women Like Us at the 2018 Neustadt Lit Fest / Photo by Nancy Barcelo In her latest collection of essays, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Stor...
Bearing the Unforgivable: A Tribute to Edwidge Danticat

By Achy Obejas

Winter 2019
Achy Obejas

Photo: Shevaun Williams Thank you to the Neustadt Prize committee, Neustadt sisters and family, the University of Oklahoma, the incredible writers who served with me on the jury last year. It is my...