The missing persons bulletin board at Navotas City Police Station in Metro Manila, June 2017. Photo courtesy of the author
Do so many opportunities to bear witness only create opportuniti…
Essays
photos: shevaun williams & associates After being visibly moved by dance adaptations of four of her poems, Dr. Nelson delivered the following keynote to the packed audience in attendance, wh…
A statue of a young Carver at the George Washington Carver National Monument. photo: jinx!/flickr Hayan Charara, a poet, editor, essayist, and children’s book author, nominated Marilyn Nelson for…
The Seer, by Maia Cruz Palileo A writer undergoes a transformation while overcoming a series of obstacles as she works to reunite her mother with her mother’s siblings in the Philippine…
Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the dif…
illustration: jen rickard blair On the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps ev…
Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret Benzet Returning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its sur…
The kultrún is the quintessential Mapuche instrument. A drum of carved wood and animal hide, it is traditionally played by a machi, or Mapuche shaman, during rituals and celebrations. Althou…
Jaume Plensa’s Tolerance statue and Rosemont Pedestrian Bridge, Houston, Texas / Photo by Patrick Feller If a profligate comes to you with news, make sure you understand it…
Photo: Daniel Tellman / Flickr Societies venerate their storytellers almost as much as the stories. We talk about the wonders that stories can create, the ways they can change t…
An old Japanese maple in the Japanese garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis / Photo by Kent Burgess thewaysofthegarden.squarespace.com In this brief essay, poet and translator H. L.…
Photo by C. P. Ewing / Flickr Rumi remains the most popular poet in America today. To many who claim to be “spiritual but not religious,” his poems represent direct spiritual connection with a h…
Agostino Arrivabene (b. 1967, Italy), Androgynous, 2016, oil, gold leaf on linen, 50x40cm. Courtesy of the artist. Religion is at its best when it becomes a countercultural forc…
Photo: Fardo Dopstra (Fardodopstra.com) The tradition of toast-giving has followed my family through centuries and continents. This essay tells the tale of one family’s survival and the toasts—po…
Clockwise from Top: Ama Ata Aidoo, Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley Taking stock of the African Poetry Book Fund’s project to bring contemporary African poetry into the f…
Photo: Miami Herald / Getty For some years, Enrique Ferrari, known in Buenos Aires as Kike (kee-Kay), lived in the United States. His stay ended the day a traffic cop asked him for his pa…
Photo: Jason Devaun The binaries of life bite at 3 a.m.You don’t need to fast-forward time.Envision vanishing before it happens.For those who care to…
Each year, writers and musicians from across the globe converge in Kosovo for the three-day Festival of Literature in Orllan, a vibrant celebration of local and international literature. Here, poe…
Isolation: Companion of Conscience, by Georgitta J. Valiyamattam Iconoclast Indian novelist Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, set in the maximum city of Mumbai, is not only the…
Migratory art refers to works that are visual (or aural) representations of the act of migration, made by immigrants. The concepts of body horror, evolution, and audio stimuli illuminate their aes…
Native Nations Rise protest. Photo by Victoria Pickering/Flickr I’m mixed but that doesn’t mean I’m mixed up—it just means my parents fell in love across a racial and cultural divide that split my bl…
America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Current (2005), acrylic on steel, 18 x 18 in, part of the Greater Vehicle series The innovator isn’t important. It’s whoever has the watershed moment.…
Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota / German / Welsh), Self-Reflection (2011), oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist (dyaniwhitehawk.com) In Spring 1992 World Literature Today…
Remnants of an oil spill in the Niger Delta. Photo: Michael Uwemedimo / cmapping.net Niger Delta poet Ebi Yeibo’s verse lyrically engages the Nigerian nation on looming postindependence issues wh…
Portrait of “the master of the ghazal” Ghalib, by Urdu Shayar. Dinodia Photos / Alamy Stock Photo Poetry is of course a universal art, but is it possible for a particular poetic form to be not only u…
