We Were All We Had
August 6, 2020
Even before I knew I was the only American citizen among us, I felt responsible for protecting my family.
Guernica
A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics
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Twelve Poems by Female Fighters
July 28, 2020
Translated by Muna Gurung, Meena Kandasamy, and Jessica Rainey.
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Summer Camp 1968
July 15, 2020
I felt a guilt like some radioactive isotope whose half-life has not yet expired.
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In the Dead of Night
June 17, 2020
If my daughter remembers anything from this time, it will be the waiting.
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Baking Through a Plague
June 12, 2020
On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.
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Surprised by Grief, Soothed by Korean Television Drama
May 18, 2020
When my father’s death dissolved my life’s plot, I could only cling to someone else’s story.
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Fear in the Time of the Javelina
May 13, 2020
A younger boy swore he’d seen one of the pigs standing on its hind legs, peering through his trailer window.
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Family Man
April 15, 2020
I never knew my uncle. But it's the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.
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Faery Land
March 24, 2020
“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.
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With Jazz on the Turntable and a Drink in His Hand
January 22, 2020
In the dark nights after long days, the music gave our fathers something to cling to.
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Translation and the Family of Things
October 29, 2019
A young writer discovers her grandmother’s literary secret.
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Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl
September 30, 2019
In an excerpt from her new memoir, Jeannie Vanasco grapples with whether, and how, to approach the boy who raped her fourteen years before.
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Jasmine Fingers
August 22, 2019
How does the poem keep us there? in memory? in the traces? keep us coming back?
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Bahrain on Horseback
August 14, 2019
The author returns to the landscape of her childhood to discover it has disappeared, along with many political dissidents.
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Beautiful in the Distance
June 24, 2019
The tick doesn’t know that it is strong enough to kill a full-grown human. It only knows that it is hungry.
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Where Disease Stopped and My Brother Began
June 21, 2019
Coming to terms with a sibling's suicide.
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The Power of High Heels
June 19, 2019
Not necessarily for the male gaze, heels can exemplify an assertive personality, a refusal to be ignored.
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Mr. Rain Jacket
May 20, 2019
Homeless, solitary, and schizophrenic, my brother had nothing to shield him from everybody else.
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Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys
May 15, 2019
Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.
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Squirrel King
May 9, 2019
The city didn’t put stop signs at our suburban corner until I was thirteen. Despite the reckless driving, no one was ever killed. Pet dogs and stray cats weren’t so lucky. Neither were the squirrels.
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Life and Death in West Virginia
April 5, 2019
I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.
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Escaping Paradise
April 1, 2019
How my family barely got away from the deadliest fire in California history.
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The Grandmother Character
March 19, 2019
I thought: I would never write a fictional scene like this, because it was too obvious—the art butting up against reality, as though my story held some kind of portentous power.
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The Disaster Store
March 18, 2019
My daughter is a more realistic judge of character than I, less likely to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Is this man, for instance, trying to save our lives or make a buck?
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Dancing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in Black and Brown
March 15, 2019
How can I perform a story that isn’t mine to tell?
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An Apex of Babble
March 6, 2019
I grew up in a community where the phenomenon of speaking in tongues (called glossolalia by linguists) is more than just some loaves-and-fishes Sunday School curiosity.
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How To Bury Your Dead Pet Monkey
February 25, 2019
Rivalry, longing, practical jokes, and unrecognized genius in a 1980s children’s theater.
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The History Before Us
January 21, 2019
How can we be sure the atrocities of the past will stay in the past?
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Our Last Days in Country
November 29, 2018
A young Marine on being eighteen and deployed a few miles from the D.M.Z., meeting girls and waiting for ghosts.
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Late-Life Love
October 23, 2018
Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace, for us.
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On the Edge of Seventeen
October 19, 2018
A teenage boy, a violent incident, and twenty years of reckoning.
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Fragments From a War-Torn Childhood
September 12, 2018
The Iran-Iraq war that made me who I am ended thirty years ago. Keeping quiet will not make it go away. I don’t believe in talking through it, either. Between silence and speech lies the act of writing. This is where I seek my remedy.
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When Naming Isn’t Enough
August 31, 2018
No matter how inexperienced I was, I didn't deserve what he did.
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Caravan for the Disappeared
May 24, 2018
A Salvadoran woman looks for a sister who went missing while trying to make it to America.
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Animals Died at Our House, and Other Things that Burn or Wear Away
May 7, 2018
There was the time I found an entire horse or cow skeleton laid neatly on top of the shed roof. When I asked my brothers what it was doing there, they looked at me patiently and said, We found it in the desert.
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Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage
May 7, 2018
The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.
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The Next Morning
March 14, 2018
There was one name and one name only, just hers over and over and over.
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I Used to Give Men Mercy
February 12, 2018
On the journey from webcam girl to professor and breakout memoirist, and not letting white academia drag her down.
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Letter from a Target-Rich Environment
January 10, 2018
In an age where mass shootings can transform malls or classrooms into war-zones, teachers are getting new training: combat vigilance.
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Doctor of Refugees
December 10, 2017
You never get used to seeing dead refugee children, or women who died giving birth on a wrecked boat, their tiny babies still attached to them by the umbilical cord.
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Black Girl Going Mad
December 4, 2017
Mental health, race, and trauma in the city of Good Christian Bitches.
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How to Explain to Your Son Why White Supremacists Are Marching on Your Town
November 6, 2017
Reckoning with racism and violence at home in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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Primed for Mysticism and Scared to Death
October 23, 2017
A writer reckons with Judaism, the writing life, and the allure of fundamentalism.
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Waiting for Hurricane Irma
September 27, 2017
Me, myself, and Sarasota: a meditation on real and metaphorical storms.
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Writer-in-Residence at a Homeless Shelter
September 25, 2017
A teacher chronicles his month in a Colorado facility, where charmers and conmen offer advice and trauma is tallied by number.
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Kiss, Kiss
August 31, 2017
My son does not give kisses. He devours. He will take your face in both hands and open his mouth wide and seek to encapsulate the whole of you.
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Svetlana Alexievich: A Poet of People
August 30, 2017
The “Nobel laureate of Russian misery” reaches American readers, and new heights.
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Larry Clark’s Teenage Lust, and My Own
July 13, 2017
As a teenager, I was obsessed with a sexy photograph. When I grew up, it looked different.
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The Fallout
July 10, 2017
In St. Louis, America's nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.
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What Seems to Be the Problem, Officer?
June 5, 2017
Before his arrest, my father was a local hero for putting bad guys behind bars.
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The Last Ten Entries of Ren Hang’s Depression Diary
May 26, 2017
The photographer and poet, before ending his life.
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After the Earthquake
May 22, 2017
Oral histories on life, death, and survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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Until the Last Dog Is Hung
April 17, 2017
Crime, addiction, and religion meet at the greyhound race track.
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Doll in Shadow
March 24, 2017
Alzheimer's destroyed my mother's memory, but she remembered the doll.
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Out of the Iron Closet
March 20, 2017
In search of acceptance, a gay Russian man seeks asylum in the United States.
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Man Without Fear
January 12, 2017
On an island, marred by a bloody past, a poet falls in love.
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George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba
January 2, 2017
When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA.
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On Coupling: An Inventory
October 19, 2016
“I want both: marriage and lovers, freedom and security. I want my husband to say yes to this.”
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What Was Left Behind
September 5, 2016
A daughter shares her father's first responder story about searching for bodies at Ground Zero.
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Sophie Unterman: Of Course, Survivors Are Free
August 25, 2016
A writer accompanies her grandmother on a journey through sites of Holocaust remembrance.
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Break My Body
August 8, 2016
On the physical and emotional shocks of truly inhabiting our bodies.
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Ways of Seeing
June 27, 2016
Negotiating our diversity in a world that so often defaults to skin color.
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Taking The Long Way Home
June 22, 2016
An Immigrant father-to-be ponders what homeland means to him, and what it might mean to his daughter.
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A Century of Progress
June 13, 2016
Uncovering the story of a grandmother's racial passing and its effect on following generations.
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A Moment of Honesty
May 11, 2016
On Music: A song is the complete acceptance of impermanence. It would not begin if it could not end.
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Crisis of Finite Worlds
May 6, 2016
When my father became my mother, gender reassignment in Appalachia.
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The View from the Fourth Floor
May 3, 2016
A mother reflects on her grief during her son’s illness, and on her enduring love of reading.
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Remembering John the Hotdog Man
April 22, 2016
A writer reflects on childhood memories of her neighborhood hotdog vendor.
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The Wild Wild West of Weed on the Web
April 20, 2016
How a digital media company is challenging stereotypes about the growing landscape of marijuana culture.
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The Violence Was Once Mine
April 19, 2016
A journalist confronts her feeling of helplessness in watching a war from afar.
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Letter to a Future Daughter on the Occasion of the “Fishball Revolution”
February 29, 2016
When Hong Kong used to be home
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Take My Name and Say It Slow
February 1, 2016
"But where are you really from?" they ask, and I never know who to answer for, Thomas or Nuocheng?