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On Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago
Even under Stalin’s successor Khrushchev there was still no realistic hope of publishing the entire book. So in 1957 Pasternak finally allowed a manuscript (including the poems, published as… More
On Alice Walker’s The Color Purple
I live in a world that resounds with stories of young girls being raped, experiencing first love, where court systems rule against poor blacks and further commit violence against… More
Selected Poems of Hester Knibbe
There you sit / in the same skirt in which, waters ago, / you boarded the ship, but the dance / has drained from your feet. More
On Translating Hester Knibbe
There were openly false statements, lies that gave way to truths. There was often a little something indigestible in the poems, something to puzzle over, and this was what… More
On Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs del Mal
The judges argued that these pieces would “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency.” In other words, they were too… More
My Father’s Violin
...lying in the back of another old Chevy—a ‘50 model—I watched passing headlights pinwheel over the torn headliner, and thought of my father home in Pennsylvania, dreaming unimaginable dreams… More
War on a Lunchbreak
Not that I ever lay hiding // dying in a ditch, but if I had, I think that I’d / know much about dry grass, the incredible value of… More
Steve Champion, PEN Prison Writing Award Winner, Hunger Strikes in San Quentin
Steve Champion, a prize-winning writer in the PEN Prison Writing contest, has been on hunger strike in the Adjustment Center (solitary confinement) of San Quentin's death row since October… More
Bleak Housing & Black Americans
The United States seems not merely to tolerate but actually to revel in inflicting barbaric human degradation upon prisoners—not just for months or years, but for decades and lifetimes... More
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