Author Archive
A Small Place and the Attempts to Ban Critical Race Theory
There is a key part of A Small Place in which Kincaid writes about how people like her, who come from colonized homes, struggle with their past. “Do you ever try to understand why people like me cannot get over the past, cannot forgive and cannot forget?” she asks.
The Revision of Stories in Long Division
In revising his debut novel, about Black teenagers who time travel to see their family, Laymon gets to relive the experience of creating and being in his novel, in a world he created to and for his peoples.
The Power of the Cuban Peoples’s Verses
José Martí, Margarita Engle, and the San Isidro Movement have contributed, over the course of a century, to the long tradition of writing about a free Cuba through poetics. The government knows the revolutionary history and power of artists and poets in Cuba, and they fear it.
Reading The Transmigration of Bodies
When I started reading Yuri Herrera’s 2013 novel, I wasn’t trying to read another pandemic book. The pandemic has fatigued me more and more lately. The isolation, the death counts sent to my phone every morning, the anxiety of unwittingly spreading the virus in the grocery store and killing
The Power of Documenting Your Own Story
Patricia Engel’s new novel demonstrates the importance of taking back your narrative, of learning and documenting your own story for no one but yourself.
The Stories Inherited in Speak, Okinawa
Elizabeth Miki Brina traces the stories of her mother and father and delves into the relationships between their homes to examine her inheritances and figure out how they’ve manifested within her.
How Home Lets Jericho Brown Bloom Poems About His Subconscious
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Brown uses physical spaces, homes, to analyze, dissect, and bloom thoughts that are hidden in his subconscious—thoughts of the traumas and terrors of the world around him, which threatens Black and Brown bodies and endangers LGBQTIA+ peoples.
Distance and Home
Writing, to me, is home. I grew up in a family of Cuban exiles. Every Sunday, they told stories about Cuba, a place I couldn’t touch or hear or smell, but that I could, at least in my mind, see. Writing forced me to look closer at these homes,
Revisiting, Revising, Reimagining Home in How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
Revisiting his 2013 essay collection has strengthened Kiese Makeba Laymon’s voice and allowed him to truly build a home in the space he keeps.
The Power of Reading About Your Home
Jaquira Díaz’s 2019 memoir resonated deeply with me in a way that a bronzed Al Pacino never could, and that a book never had.