Essays
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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-pac... -
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 str... -
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... -
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 f... -
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 Neus... -
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 f... -
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 r... -
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... -
Basque poet and bertsolari winner Maialen Lujanbio during the 2017 Bertsolari Grand Championship. Photo: Dani Blanco / Wikimedia In Basque and other minority-language traditions i... -
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... -
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 d... -
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 traf... -
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 o... -
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-bo... -
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... -
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. ... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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-... -
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... -
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 R...
