Genre: Essays

If ever he writes a memoir, it will reliably contain the falsehood that in 2019 he quit the United States for Côte d’Ivoire to sit out the coronavirus pandemic. Also, perhaps that he wished to elude a great—and imminent—North American …

I. 

I spoke to Adrienne Rich just once, after a reading she gave at the University of Virginia in April 1998. The line in the auditorium to have her sign my copy of The Fact of a Doorframe was long. …

1.

In telling the story of where I went wrong, my mom drew two lines to mark the turning points that led me down a singular, inevitable path toward a male babysitter who drew no lines at all. 

One “if …

In rural Laos, a village had relocated only meters away from its original site after a recent dam construction submerged it. The historical village lay under an artificial lake, where tree branches poked from underwater. In the afternoon, our modest …

You know, I think these days we would call it a mild stroke . . . yes, I think your dad had a mild stroke. 

Could that happen from drinking?

Well, I don’t know, but he was very drunk. …

1.

Every morning of my childhood, my mother emerged from the bathroom after a shower perfumed by a heady mix of talcum powder and baby oil. Dressed in a blouse and petticoat, the softness of her belly just spilled over …

What does it mean to be southern? What does it mean to feel and think deeply through multiple geographies of the South? What is invoked by the “southern” of “Southern Post-Colonial,” and what new spatial and political possibilities are rendered …

At the age of fourteen, during my last year in junior high school in Gardena, I began to realize that if I were ever to get a date I ’d have to revolutionize my musical point of reference. The faux …