Puterbaugh Essay Series

Déchoukaj’: Uprooting the Fetishes of White Supremacy

By Fabienne Kanor

Autumn 2020
Fabienne Kanor

photo: Cristian / Flickr A writer traces how the murder of George Floyd is continuing to arouse people in cities everywhere, including her own mother in Martinique. Sa ki ta la r...
Why Iranians Continue to Seek Refuge in Australia

By Shokoofeh Azar

Summer 2020
Shokoofeh Azar

An Iranian detainee hangs up her laundry on the fence at the Construction camp detention center used for younger men and women and children. February 26, 2012, on Christmas Island, Australia. Pho...
On Our Toes: Women against the Femicide Machine in Mexico

By Cristina Rivera Garza

Winter 2020
Cristina Rivera Garza

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...
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...
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...
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...
An Anatomy of Lostness

By Anna Badkhen

November 2018
Anna Badkhen

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...
In the Den of the Voice

By Philip Metres

September 2018
Philip Metres

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...
The Return of Scheherazade, or the Rise of the Iraqi Novel after 2003

By Sadek R. Mohammed

March 2018
Sadek R. Mohammed

Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the dif...
Border Ghosts

By Kapka Kassabova

January 2018
Kapka Kassabova

Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret Benzet Returning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its sur...
Selective Empathy: Stories and the Power of Narrative

By Aminatta Forna

November 2017
Aminatta Forna

Photo: Daniel Tellman / Flickr Societies venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change t...
Verse Africa: The Malleable Poetics of Some Contemporary African Poets

By Matthew Shenoda

September 2017
Matthew Shenoda

Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Taking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the f...
Streaming

By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

May 2017
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

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....
When Bodies Speak

By Githa Hariharan

March 2017
Githa Hariharan

A group of women stripped naked in broad daylight to protest against the brutality of the Assam Rifles army contingent (July 2004). Braiding together an epic story and India’s ongoing su...
Strangers in the Country of the Poet

By Julia Fiedorczuk

January 2017
Julia Fiedorczuk

“One Foot Wrong” by Parée Erica. Parée Erica/Flickr Against the background of the Polish parliament’s consideration of a law that would effectively ban abortion and the ensuing protests,...
Of Gatekeepers and Bedtime Stories: The Ongoing Struggle to Make Women’s Voices Heard

By Alison Anderson

November 2016
Alison Anderson

Photo: Flickr.com/people/nex230 Do we need a special issue devoted solely to women writers? Indeed we do. Author and translator Alison Anderson explains why. Do we still need magazi...
The Scold’s Bridle

By Dubravka Ugrešić

September 2016
Dubravka Ugrešić

Made of iron, this scold’s bridle from Belgium dates from the 16th or 17th century. The strut of metal that went into the wearer’s mouth to hold down her tongue has broken off. If there’...
Writing a Life Back into the World

By Bernice Chauly

May 2016
Bernice Chauly

The author’s father, Surinder Singh, onboardThe Southampton bound for England, 1958 In the wake of her father’s death, a Malaysian author discovers the writer within and ends up writing...
We Were Born in the Houses of Storytellers

By Ghassan Zaqtan

March 2016
Ghassan Zaqtan

Ghassan Zaqtan (left) and Mahmoud Darwish in a 2007 photo taken by Palestinian poet Bashir Shalash. After presenting a sweeping landscape of Arabic poetry since pre-Islamic days...
Fiction: A Transgressive Art

By K. Anis Ahmed

January 2016
K. Anis Ahmed

A Bangladeshi writer traces his quest to dodge the external and internal censors and considers what fiction at its best can do: “sail past all censors to uncover the tender and transgres...