essays

SOME WOMEN’S STORIES demand patience. I have learned this over the years through my research on food history and pouring over women’s letters, draft manuscripts, and clipped recipes. And not all of their stories are equally accessible. The papers of the most prominent...

I felt an immediate connection with poet Omar Pimienta when we met at orientation. We were both starting graduate programs at the University of California, San Diego — I was in the MFA program in Writing and he was there for a PhD in Literature. We talked of poetry...

On a recent vacation to Chicago, I spent an afternoon exploring the hip Lincoln Park neighborhood that was my home for the week. I stumbled upon a Warby Parker store and was immediately consumed with trying on every pair of chic, oversized glasses within my reach. In...

“We tend to think that a deeply ingrained system, such as capitalism, can be resisted only by equal and opposite action,” writes Alexandra Kleeman in her Vanity Fair review of one of 2018’s most talked about novels. “But in a culture based upon striving,” she goes on,...

Salvadoran poet Leticia Hernández-Linares steps into the spotlight wearing a striped black-and-white dress with large flowing sleeves, a chunky beaded necklace, and bright red lipstick. With a personality to match her bold outfit, Hernández-Linares rattles her...

Poetry is having a major moment. We seem to turn to it, to need it most when the world’s leaders debase language and thereby thought and action. And yet within the world of poetry, a division exists, an aesthetic line in the sand, between written word and spoken word...

In 2016, a Norwegian writer posted an iconic image from the Vietnam War on Facebook — a photograph of nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc naked and screaming, running from an aerial napalm attack that inflicted severe burns down her back. The photo, by AP photographer...

“He’s Mexican,” I told my French mom about my boyfriend.“Oh, does he have a mustache and a sombrero?” she replied, amused.After months spent in Mexico, mostly among the Jewish community, I was taken aback by my mom’s comment. Where did this idea of Mexican identity...

When and how do we talk about the attitudes of an entire field? These conversations often occur in office hours, not in articles, emerging over drinks at conferences or in fights in closed Facebook groups. In my field of expertise, medieval studies, I’ve noticed an...

Life lessons have the tendency to sneak up on us. Often, we’re going about our business, doing what we do, and a message from the universe smacks us upside the head without warning. If we are paying attention, the impact can be life-altering. Our perceptions of...

For years, we had cats. Gigantic rescue cats, retrieved from a Philadelphia parking lot when they were only a pair of gray and black kittens, as benign and rambunctious as the cubs in Tiger King. But they grew into the sort of cats who fantasized all day long about...

Throughout my adulthood, curanderas have said that my grandmother watches over me. I knew this was true when my mother came back from a visit to Mexico five years ago. She opened her suitcase and handed me a white plastic rosary and a black shawl. These items belonged...