Category: Biography and Memoir

  • By Rashod Ollison It didn’t surprise me to see him in the news. Back home in central Arkansas where I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, Judge Wendell Griffen has long been a respected presence in the local press. But this week as he faces impeachment for a Good Friday protest against the death…

  • By Bill Ayers | And then they arrived. Let the rumpus begin! Spirited greetings and introductions all around, laughter at the improbability of the whole thing, a flurry of separate conversations as wine was poured and glasses lifted. I proposed a toast to Tucker, thanking him for his generous gift to the Public Square and…

  • By Angela Maria Spring Sometimes it takes a cataclysmic event to unearth who we are. Even though I’ve been a bookseller of color for sixteen years, I didn’t fully realize until last year how great the need was for an inclusive bookstore curated and shaped by a majority of people of color. I started Duende…

  • A Q&A with Marianne Leone | My mother was a singular, irrepressible individual. Her wake, held in the working class area of Newton where I grew up called “The Lake,” was like a celebrity’s, with people from all walks of life telling stories about her. I wanted to tell her story, too, and the idea…

  • A Q&A with Will Myers: I had read Elie Wiesel’s Night and The Diary of Anne Frank as a young reader, but unfortunately it wasn’t until I was an adult that I read Man’s Search for Meaning. So when I began thinking about a young readers edition of the book, I was really excited to…

  • By Helen Benedict and Lynn K. Hall When it was reported in March that a Facebook group of some 30,000 members of the Marine Corps have been sharing nonconsensual nude photographs of female marines, it echoed all the other sexual abuse scandals in the military, stretching way back to Vietnam. The difference was that the…

  • By Tony Bartelme To Carin’s eyes, some of the children looked as if they wouldn’t last the night; rail thin, they had the faraway gazes of prison inmates. A few children did indeed look well, but Sakweli made no move to discharge them. Odd. The ward was full; shouldn’t they discharge these healthy children to…

  • Today is International Women’s Day, a global day to honor and celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. Observed since the early 1900s, it marks a call to action for accelerating gender equality. This year’s campaign theme, #BeBoldForChange, implores us to help build a more inclusive, gender-equal world. It also coincides with…

  • By Martin Moran A few years ago I had the privilege of serving as a French-speaking interpreter for a group of refugees, many of them survivors of torture, who were seeking asylum in the United States. Most of the immigrants I worked with were from war-torn regions of Africa. They all happened to be Muslim.…

  • By Gayatri Patnaik One of my sharpest memories as a girl was when an immigration officer came to our house in rural Finzel, Maryland when I was about nine years old. He showed up at our house unannounced and I still remember the stunned look on my mother’s face when she answered the door. I…