“In my defense,” he said, “I thought you were 13.”

Finding connection after a complicated family history.

“I want both: marriage and lovers, freedom and security. I want my husband to say yes to this.”

A daughter shares her father's first responder story about searching for bodies at Ground Zero.

Breathability then and now.

A writer accompanies her grandmother on a journey through sites of Holocaust remembrance.

The KKK and a Cold War execution inform a marriage

Despite a life of poverty, sustenance of the heart endures.

On the physical and emotional shocks of truly inhabiting our bodies.

An elegy to a beloved pet.

Crossing borders in the wake of the Brexit vote.

Negotiating our diversity in a world that so often defaults to skin color.

An Immigrant father-to-be ponders what homeland means to him, and what it might mean to his daughter.

If I ever make it and they ask me where I’m from, I’ll say MARs: Moving, AIDS, and Religion.

Uncovering the story of a grandmother's racial passing and its effect on following generations.

Finding life in death on the edge of the Atlantic.

On Music: A song is the complete acceptance of impermanence. It would not begin if it could not end.

When my father became my mother, gender reassignment in Appalachia.

A mother reflects on her grief during her son’s illness, and on her enduring love of reading.

An American pregnancy in Manila.

A writer reflects on childhood memories of her neighborhood hotdog vendor.

How a digital media company is challenging stereotypes about the growing landscape of marijuana culture.

A journalist confronts her feeling of helplessness in watching a war from afar.

An exodus, a return, and the questions that follow.

Obsession as symptom, cause, and cure.

A kiss transcends time, and poetry.

When Hong Kong used to be home

Kissing strangers in the rain

Recalling Ted Cruz at Princeton, and some good advice

"But where are you really from?" they ask, and I never know who to answer for, Thomas or Nuocheng?

The first installment of the series features a fairy tale come to life, if only for a moment.

Introducing a new series on perhaps the most intimate of human interactions, in all its forms.

Alone, un-housed, we moved with the current, the future suspended like the long lines of a spider’s silk flung loose on the air.

In search of the mother who gave her up for adoption, the author finds six siblings instead. Decades later, she contemplates the drug addiction that cost many of them their lives.

Counterfeit cash in China.

A family whose heritage spans borders, but separate experiences continues to divide them in their own home.

A mother reflects on fears and stark statistics, following another school shooting.

For a sign language interpreter at a murder trial, the crowning achievement is utter neutrality.

“Divorce, a fresh start.”

The winning entry of the 2015 Center for Women Writers Prize in Creative Nonfiction

Retracing Von Humboldt's footsteps, two centuries later, in a van.