Inmate Jane Doe

If one is to believe all the reports that the media broadcast or prints, one would think that 99% of all offenders were male. With the exception of a… More

Kentucky’s Shameful Statistics

According to a report from the PEW Charitable Trusts’ Center on the States, Kentucky’s prison population increased in 2007 by 12%—nearly double the rate of any other state in… More

Voice of an Unheard Nation

On the eve of November 4, 2008, the entire world rejoiced in Barack Obama being elected the 44th President of the United States of America. The land of the… More

Fado

MemoryI remember many places and events. Some of them remain in my memory like characters from a play, frozen. A slight effort is all that’s needed to bring them… More

Two-Tongued Tale

Some years ago, I began hearing voices, my own to be precise. It started with a scream. No, I’m not delusional. This is how it happened. Having had a… More

On Title and Talk

In translating Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, Sophie Wilkins and I had great trouble finding equivalents for the infinitely subtle and nuanced gradations of title and talk in… More

Revisiting the Racial Mountain

In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Langston Hughes’s famous essay of 1926, Hughes describes his disappointment with a statement made by “one of the most promising of the… More

Looking for Black Literature?

I first understood what people meant when they spoke of intangible white privilege when I realized that I read differently than other people. Literature had often asked me to… More