The August issue of Words Without Borders has got a lovely selection of innovative nature writing from eastern Europe, central Africa, South America, and some imaginary places. Check it out if you’re looking for something interesting to read on a sultry August afternoon wherever you happen to be. Think about place, time, circumstance, and [...]
I keep forgetting to mention that I’ve got an article in the Winter 2008 issue of Soho House Magazine. Entitled “Taekwondo in a Hijab: Muscular Feminism in Iran,” it looks at the achievements of a couple of Iranian sports stars in the context of the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in that country. The magazine [...]
Just in time for Mother’s Day, a couple of my students have contributed heartrending blog posts related to mothers and grandmothers. Check out Letter from Your Gay Granddaughter and Mothers in Prison and the Children Left Behind for some non-traditional Mother’s Day reading. And, please do show the authors of those posts and other contributors [...]
What does it feel like to live through a genocide? My student Chiemela’s father knows: He was a boy in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, which according to a reporter on the scene in 1968, “deteriorated steadily from a war in which the original motivation was the reincorporation of the breakaway east into Nigeria [...]
It’s the start of a new semester and, as usual, I’m snowed under already. So, let me send you elsewhere, for some fun snow-day reading. Words Without Borders is a high-caliber online journal of translated writing. Every issue is worth browsing, with the only problem being not enough time to keep up with all of [...]
As it happens, my first words of the year turn out to be a letter to the editor published in the local newspaper today. Visit the Eastern Shore Sanctuary blog to read all about it.
The letter calls for economic and agricultural diversification here on the Delmarva peninsula, of which the Eastern Shore of Maryland is [...]
One day, I got mad at my 11th grade English teacher, who was also the adviser of the school literary journal and the sole arbiter of its literary contest. Convinced that her pedestrian sensibilities spelled doom for the chances of my spare, austere verse, I sat down at the kitchen table one night and wrote [...]
