Lives

Soft, Spotted Animal

By Ellie Eberlee September 5, 2023

Can they really both be mine, these feral fingers and the brain so ostensibly in control?

Health

Lives

La Dolce Vita

By Tanya Bush August 7, 2023

Didn’t the Italians think we were all the same — greedy Americans in search of our personal paradise?

EuropeTravel & Adventure

Lives

Choosing the Flowers

By Sanjna Singh October 10, 2022

Does grief distort reality or create it?

Asia & OceaniaFamily & Relationships

Lives

A Lineage of Nonconsent

By Amanda E. Machado June 13, 2022

Lately, the blood I carry feels like the story of everything.

Family & RelationshipsHistory

Lives

A Discarded Shirt

By Naren Nanda March 14, 2022

Behind me is the luggage compartment, and in it is my father.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Leaving Lviv

By Agata Izabela Brewer March 9, 2022

Turning to poetry to parse a long history of loss and exile

ConflictEurope

Lives

In the First Days of War

By Olena Stiazhkina, translated by Ali Kinsella March 7, 2022

A dispatch from Kyiv

ConflictEurope

Lives

How to Apply Makeup

By Nicole Shawan Junior February 24, 2022

My scars are too deep, too wide, too fucked up to be smoothed over.

ClassRaceUSA

Lives

Red Tides

By Eiren Caffall February 10, 2022

My father, and the ecosystem I loved, were both slipping away.

Bodies & NatureClimate & Environment

Lives

The Plague Legends

By Emily Urquhart December 1, 2021

I’ve come across these legends in my life before, but only occasionally. Never so many at once.

Arts & CultureHealth

Lives

Breathe In

By Bronson Lemer November 29, 2021

If I had known, maybe I would have paused before so completely surrendering my body to the US military.

HealthUSA

Lives

Abundant

By Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe November 23, 2021

This body, your body, is always ready — for love, for affection, for pleasure, for decadent songs of praise.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Departures

By Myriam J. A. Chancy November 3, 2021

I was still working out how to live in the shadow of my mother's absence, just as I had learned to live with all that had been lost of our homeland.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Gettysburg

By Kirtan Nautiyal October 27, 2021

I could not figure out what someone of my skin color would have been doing in the 88th Volunteer Infantry, or any other regiment for that matter.

USA

Lives

One Man’s Pest

By Sam Schramski October 13, 2021

In the urban Amazon, black vultures are a threat to aviation — but otherwise a boon, however distasteful, to humans.

Climate & Environment

Lives

Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Divided City

By Samira Shackle September 29, 2021

A map-maker works to get basic amenities in his community. An excerpt from the book, out now.

Asia & OceaniaTravel & Adventure

Lives

This Town Has Become a Museum

By Andres Octavio September 21, 2021

This is life in a dwindling community eroding by the day, adagio, slowly, like a seaside cliff.

EuropeHistory

Lives

Coming Home to Somewhere Unfamiliar

By Lilly Dancyger April 26, 2021

In an excerpt from her memoir Negative Space, Lilly Dancyger writes about moving back to New York City as a teenager and grappling with her father's death.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Elegy

By Fathima Cader September 9, 2021

On critical race theory

Lives

Charting the Land of Great Loneliness

By Carin Clevidence April 13, 2021

At your wedding, you set out on a two-person expedition toward a place you try to envision but have never seen. Later, you may wake one morning alone under an alien sky and wonder how you ever came to be here.

Family & RelationshipsTravel & Adventure

Lives

Benzo Mama

By Eaton Hamilton September 7, 2021

I am a boy, but I’m not a boy like my brother. Still, neither am I a girl like my sister. “Janie, be a weed,” Mom says.

Family & RelationshipsGender

Lives

Lineal Gaps

By Esther Hayes April 6, 2021

For the women in my family, is it the holes left by absence that cleave us together?

Family & RelationshipsRace

Lives

There’s No Simple Way to Make it OK

By Kathy Davis March 31, 2021

I was enamored with the notion that all I had to do to drive the sadness away, to have something to look forward to, was open a can of meadows.

Bodies & NatureClimate & Environment

Lives

It’s About Altares

By M. Vázquez Vasquez August 17, 2021

I make Altares for our Muertos. I honor our Antepasados.

PEN America DREAMing Out Loud Family & RelationshipsReligion

Lives

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse

By Charif Majdalani, translated from the French by Ruth Diver August 4, 2021

The Lebanese novelist captures the months before the deadly explosion. An excerpt from his new book, out today.

GovernmentMENA

Lives

Pickled

By Mohan Fitzgerald July 27, 2021

The pickling happens when you become too rich and too powerful. The power makes you mean, and that meanness is like a brine.

Family & Relationships

Lives

At the Bend of the Road

By Aube Rey Lescure July 20, 2021

On the Camino de Santiago, a female pilgrim walks in solitude—utterly vulnerable, utterly free.

Gender

Lives

Hell Is A City in Texas

By Reverie Koniecki June 14, 2021

The first time I see him, I want this guy on my side. And so we become friends, mainly because I listen to his stories.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Shareef

By Mahreen Sohail December 14, 2020

Over time and across geographies, clothes underscore a writer's changing relationship to her appearance, her family, and her grief.

Clothes, Interrupted Family & Relationships

Lives

We Were All We Had

By Elham Khatami August 6, 2020

Even before I knew I was the only American citizen among us, I felt responsible for protecting my family.

Family & RelationshipsMENA

Lives

Twelve Poems by Female Fighters

By Aatilatchumi, Captain Kasturi, Lil Milagro Ramírez, Nibha Shah, and Captain Vaanati July 28, 2020

Translated by Muna Gurung, Meena Kandasamy, and Jessica Rainey.

Female Fighters

Lives

Summer Camp 1968

By Samuel G. Freedman July 15, 2020

I felt a guilt like some radioactive isotope whose half-life has not yet expired.

Race

Lives

In the Dead of Night

By Jaclyn Moyer June 17, 2020

If my daughter remembers anything from this time, it will be the waiting.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Mi querida Sanaë

By Sanaë Lemoine June 16, 2020

How a mother’s journal revealed the woman I never knew

Family & Relationships

Lives

Baking Through a Plague

By Alia Volz June 12, 2020

On one of her monthly brownie runs, my mom caught her first glimpse of the monster coming our way.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Surprised by Grief, Soothed by Korean Television Drama

By Wendy Gan May 18, 2020

When my father’s death dissolved my life’s plot, I could only cling to someone else’s story.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Fear in the Time of the Javelina

By Zoë Bossiere May 13, 2020

A younger boy swore he’d seen one of the pigs standing on its hind legs, peering through his trailer window.

USA

Lives

Family Man

By Joanna Hershon April 15, 2020

I never knew my uncle. But it's the absence of inquiry that feels most disquieting.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Push Play

By Chris Dennis April 6, 2020

It is now mostly unclear why I thought it was a good idea to bring Dolly Parton’s Greatest Hits to school with me.

Arts & Culture

LivesPhotography

Faery Land

By Jeff Sharlet March 24, 2020

“Don’t take chances,” he said. “Given your history.” But chances, not history, are what we’re given.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

With Jazz on the Turntable and a Drink in His Hand

By Francis Wilkinson January 22, 2020

In the dark nights after long days, the music gave our fathers something to cling to.

Arts & Culture

Lives

Translation and the Family of Things

By Crystal Hana Kim October 29, 2019

A young writer discovers her grandmother’s literary secret.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

By Jeannie Vanasco 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.

Family & RelationshipsGenderJusticeUSA

EssayLives

Jasmine Fingers

By Lubna Safi August 22, 2019

How does the poem keep us there? in memory? in the traces? keep us coming back?

Arts & CultureConflict

Lives

Bahrain on Horseback

By Laura Dean August 14, 2019

The author returns to the landscape of her childhood to discover it has disappeared, along with many political dissidents.

ConflictMENA

Lives

Blood Oranges

By Carla Bruce-Eddings July 24, 2019

I watched my skin split, tender and pliant as fruit.

Bodies & Nature

Lives

Beautiful in the Distance

By Josh Potter 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.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

Where Disease Stopped and My Brother Began

By Katherine Rowland June 21, 2019

Coming to terms with a sibling's suicide.

Family & RelationshipsHealth

Lives

The Power of High Heels

By Rafaela Bassili June 19, 2019

Not necessarily for the male gaze, heels can exemplify an assertive personality, a refusal to be ignored.

Family & RelationshipsGender

Lives

Mr. Rain Jacket

By Marin Sardy May 20, 2019

Homeless, solitary, and schizophrenic, my brother had nothing to shield him from everybody else.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys

By Sophia Shalmiyev and Leni Zumas May 15, 2019

Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.

Bodies & NatureGender

Lives

Squirrel King

By Steven A. Miller 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.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

Home Visit

By Lori Lynn Turner April 30, 2019

Making oneself at home in prison

Family & RelationshipsJustice

Lives

Life and Death in West Virginia

By Christa Parravani April 5, 2019

I’m in a haunted place, in my home and in my body.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

Escaping Paradise

By Melissa Mesku April 1, 2019

How my family barely got away from the deadliest fire in California history.

Climate & EnvironmentFamily & Relationships

Lives

The Grandmother Character

By Maria Kuznetsova 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.

Arts & CultureFamily & Relationships

FictionLives

The Disaster Store

By Helen Phillips 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?

Climate Fiction Family & Relationships

EssayLives

Dancing Alvin Ailey’s Revelations in Black and Brown

By Jamila Wilkinson March 15, 2019

How can I perform a story that isn’t mine to tell?

Arts & CultureRace

EssayLives

An Apex of Babble

By John Sperry 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.

Religion

Lives

How To Bury Your Dead Pet Monkey

By Sandra Newman February 25, 2019

Rivalry, longing, practical jokes, and unrecognized genius in a 1980s children’s theater.

Family & Relationships

EssayLives

The History Before Us

By Jessica Jacobs January 21, 2019

How can we be sure the atrocities of the past will stay in the past?

ConflictHistory

Lives

Your Next Miscarriage

By Jonathan Crowl January 8, 2019

This was the plan before the good news became bad news.

Family & Relationships

EssayLives

Our Last Days in Country

By Curtis J. Graham 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.

Asia & OceaniaConflictTravel & AdventureUSA

Lives

Late-Life Love

By Susan Gubar October 23, 2018

Old lovers know that love does not conquer all, that our intimacy cannot establish a safe haven somewhere, someplace, for us.

Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

On the Edge of Seventeen

By Sarah Kasbeer October 19, 2018

A teenage boy, a violent incident, and twenty years of reckoning.

Family & RelationshipsJustice

Lives

Fragments From a War-Torn Childhood

By Amir Ahmadi Arian 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.

ConflictMENA

Lives

When Naming Isn’t Enough

By Rebecca Hazelwood August 31, 2018

No matter how inexperienced I was, I didn't deserve what he did.

Family & RelationshipsSex

Lives

All Words Fly

By Sara Nović August 21, 2018

On finding the language to mourn.

Family & RelationshipsHealthHistory

Lives

Caravan for the Disappeared

Story by Maya Averbuch | Photos by Consuelo Pagaza May 24, 2018

A Salvadoran woman looks for a sister who went missing while trying to make it to America.

ConflictFamily & Relationships

Lives

Animals Died at Our House, and Other Things that Burn or Wear Away

By Autumn Watts 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.

Deserts AmericasBodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

Hello Blood: The Dance of Miscarriage

By Kimi Eisele May 7, 2018

The baby stayed in the desert. I myself stayed in darkness for a long time.

Deserts AmericasBodies & Nature

Lives

The Next Morning

By J.T. Price March 14, 2018

There was one name and one name only, just hers over and over and over.

The Kiss Family & Relationships

Lives

I Used to Give Men Mercy

By Terese Mailhot February 12, 2018

On the journey from webcam girl to professor and breakout memoirist, and not letting white academia drag her down.

Lit WorldRace

Lives

Letter from a Target-Rich Environment

By Barrett Swanson January 10, 2018

In an age where mass shootings can transform malls or classrooms into war-zones, teachers are getting new training: combat vigilance.

Conflict

Lives

Doctor of Refugees

By Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta 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.

EuropeMENA

EssayLives

Black Girl Going Mad

By Rivers Solomon December 4, 2017

Mental health, race, and trauma in the city of Good Christian Bitches.

HealthRace

Lives

How to Explain to Your Son Why White Supremacists Are Marching on Your Town

By Jocelyn Nicole Johnson November 6, 2017

Reckoning with racism and violence at home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

ConflictRaceUSA

Lives

Primed for Mysticism and Scared to Death

By Arielle Angel October 23, 2017

A writer reckons with Judaism, the writing life, and the allure of fundamentalism.

Arts & CultureReligion

Lives

Waiting for Hurricane Irma

By John Sims September 27, 2017

Me, myself, and Sarasota: a meditation on real and metaphorical storms.

Climate & EnvironmentJustice

EssayLives

Writer-in-Residence at a Homeless Shelter

By John Cotter September 25, 2017

A teacher chronicles his month in a Colorado facility, where charmers and conmen offer advice and trauma is tallied by number.

Americas

Lives

Kiss, Kiss

By Ira Sukrungruang 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.

The Kiss Family & Relationships

Lives

Svetlana Alexievich: A Poet of People

By Josh Zajdman August 30, 2017

The “Nobel laureate of Russian misery” reaches American readers, and new heights.

Conflict

Lives

Foreign Body Ear

By Amital Stern August 1, 2017

On living in Jerusalem.

ConflictGenderMENA

Lives

Larry Clark’s Teenage Lust, and My Own

By Lacy Warner July 13, 2017

As a teenager, I was obsessed with a sexy photograph. When I grew up, it looked different.

GenderSex

AudioLivesNews

The Fallout

By Lacy M. Johnson July 10, 2017

In St. Louis, America's nuclear history creeps into the present, leaching into streams and bodies.

Climate & Environment

Lives

What Seems to Be the Problem, Officer?

By Rebecca Hazelwood June 5, 2017

Before his arrest, my father was a local hero for putting bad guys behind bars.

AmericasFamily & Relationships

Lives

The Last Ten Entries of Ren Hang’s Depression Diary

By Ren Hang, translated from the Chinese by Amanda Lee Koe May 26, 2017

The photographer and poet, before ending his life.

Asia & Oceania

Lives

After the Earthquake

By Peter Orner May 22, 2017

Oral histories on life, death, and survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

AmericasFamily & RelationshipsGender

Lives

Until the Last Dog Is Hung

By Ed Winstead April 17, 2017

Crime, addiction, and religion meet at the greyhound race track.

Travel & AdventureUSA

EssayLives

Doll in Shadow

By Maria Browning March 24, 2017

Alzheimer's destroyed my mother's memory, but she remembered the doll.

Family & Relationships

Lives

Out of the Iron Closet

By Masha Udensiva-Brenner March 20, 2017

In search of acceptance, a gay Russian man seeks asylum in the United States.

Asia & OceaniaPolitics

Lives

Mirror Pain

By Jessie Male March 7, 2017

A daughter reflects on her mother’s life with polio

Family & RelationshipsHealth

EssayLives

My Lost Body

By Christina Crosby February 13, 2017

The radical claim of militancy and mourning.

The Future of the Body Bodies & NatureHealth

Lives

Kissing Melissa

By Benjamin Busch January 25, 2017

An imagined kiss, remembered.

The Kiss Bodies & NatureFamily & Relationships

Lives

Man Without Fear

By Sholeh Wolpé January 12, 2017

On an island, marred by a bloody past, a poet falls in love.

The Kiss EuropeLit WorldTravel & Adventure

Lives

George Plimpton and Papa in Cuba

By Joel Whitney January 2, 2017

When Ernest Hemingway agreed to his famous Paris Review interview, he had no idea he’d be helping the CIA.

AmericasLit World

Lives

The Feels of Love

By T Kira Madden December 12, 2016

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

Family & RelationshipsGender

Lives

Plunge

By Megan Cummins December 5, 2016

Three months after my father died, my blood clotted for the first time.

Bodies & NatureFamily & RelationshipsHealth

Lives

The F Word

By Eliza Kostelanetz Schrader November 16, 2016

How queer families redefine the terms we use.

Family & RelationshipsGender

Lives

Reunion in Selma

By Rebecca Flint Marx October 27, 2016

Finding connection after a complicated family history.

Family & Relationships