essays

Literary study offers an opportunity to suspend disbelief, to imagine the world not as it is, but as it could be. This is the line I write on the syllabus for every undergraduate English course I teach. I want to make the case to my students, most of whom are not...

Cambodia is the land of Angkor Wat, a World Heritage Site more widely known than the country itself. “City of the Gods” and “Kingdom of Wonder;” these are some of the ways in which the temple complex has been described. I remember first seeing pictures of it at a...

The virtual archival exhibit Wise and Valiant: Women and Writing in the Spanish Golden Age, curated by Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute and the National Library of Spain, acknowledges that women writers of the Spanish Golden Age...

On June 19, 2020, producers Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed teamed up with the legendary jazz musician Roy Ayers to release Roy Ayers JID002, the second installment of their provocatively titled Jazz Is Dead series. Far from burying the genre, the project...

In the late 2010s, an explosion of young adult (YA) novels by Black women flooded through a previously White-dominated sphere, topping publisher lists week after week. Novels like Nicola Yoon’s The Sun Is Also a Star (2016), Nic Stone’s Dear Martin (2017), Angie...

When you read a lot of poetry, people tend to assume that you have grasped something ineffable. They might remark that you are a sensitive and empathetic person because you have spent so much of your life in the minds of others. As a reader, I will admit to...

We rarely need to ask what “self-service” means. When you fill up your gas tank on the way to work, or surreptitiously mix Coke with horchata at the soda fountain, or withdraw $40 from an ATM, you understand the procedure. The logic and technologies of self-service...

It’s early morning in Los Angeles as I walk a side street to a coffee shop to work on a revision of this essay. I’m listening to the audio version of the article “An Epidemic of Disbelief,” a story unearthing the patterns of institutional negligence by the police...

When I first read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, it stirred up feelings of indignation, confusion, and disappointment.  However, more than anything, this book made me think. That is the beauty of this book, not that it necessarily made me believe in Malcolm X’s...

The creative landscape is changing. Some might say not nearly fast enough, but change usually occurs in waves—some high and some low. Right now, I’d argue we are somewhere in the twilight of the high and low as various creative industries—namely publishing,...

Alma Sofia Esperanza José Pura Candela thinks her name is too long. When it doesn’t fit on a single sheet of paper, she tapes paper scraps onto the edges to make it fit. Alma then begins to question her place in the world, her name becoming a metonym for Latinx...

The Dashwood sisters are on the verge of a crisis. They are young, single, fatherless, and fortuneless; marriage is their only method of attaining financial and personal stability. But the kind of partnerships Elinor and Marianne Dashwood pursue, and the marriages...