Review of Corinne Demas’s novel Daughters (Little A, New York, 2025) Yes, you can go home again, but you might revert to the same person you were when you first decided to leave. Corinne Demas’s novel Daughters is a compelling examination of a daughter’s long-held resentment and fear of disappointing a parent, . . .
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Tell us about your relationship to writing. My relationship to writing began by being a voracious reader. I had a pivotal fourth grade teacher who instilled in me a practice of continuously engaging with books and reflecting on them after completion by submitting book reports. That same teacher also gave her students . . .
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His guests are still drinking, and the smoke from his meat fire rises, on this windless evening, straight up into the trees. – John Cheever, “O Youth and Beauty!” Are you filling your grill? Tis the seasonFor hanging outdoors under trees onA warm, sunny dayWith a brewski arrayand a comfortable lawn chair . . .
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This is an edited transcription of a larger recorded conversation between Kelsi Vanada and Emilio Jurado Naón, available in full below. Vanada is the translator, and Naón the author, of the novel Agustina Paz, an excerpt of which is featured in our Summer 2026 issue. Readings from the novel excerpt happen in . . .
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Photo credit: Chukwunonso Nwanze. On a visit to Ellis Island, New York, in 2007. At the height of European immigration, twelve million people passed through this hall with a new country’s name waiting for them. I arrived differently—by plane, by choice, by the long aftermath of a history that brought some here without . . .
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Describe the first time you translated from another language. Where were you? What sounds or smells or sights do you remember? Do you remember anything happening to you in that moment? In preschool I could write my cursive well so my teachers would prompt me randomly to the page like a wind-up . . .
Read MoreIn recent weeks, a wave of xenophobic and Afrophobic violence in South Africa has targeted Black and South Asian migrants in poor and working class communities, culminating in a call for them all to leave the country by June 30th. This statement is a response from the African Feminist Initiative. —Shailja Patel, Public . . .
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Photo: Islamic University of Gaza. “The science and library buildings.” Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, 2018. Each time I see another student from Gaza manage to leave to pursue their studies, I feel depressed. This is not jealousy. It is the pain of my multiple failed attempts to secure a scholarship and fulfill . . .
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A review of Rising for Palestine: Africans in Solidarity for Decolonisation and Liberation, edited by Raouf Farrah and Suraya Dadoo. Pluto Press, 2026. During a 2025 residency in Lagos, I met with some of the local LGBTQ organizers hosting me. I was wearing a Free Palestine bracelet when someone asked me a . . .
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An excerpt of “Geographical Histories of Centralia, Kansas,” written and read by Jodi Cressman.The full piece appears in our Summer 2026 issue. Tell us about your relationship to writing. For most of my professional life, I was an academic writer composing scholarly essays for a narrow audience of contemporary literature subspecialists. Then, . . .
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