Columns
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Two Poems
today, a man embarrassed himself: why don’t you write a poem about it? he said, voice interrupted by guffaws as i walked by, tired of being caught between humans, uninspired by a conversation about the fda and medical technology.
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Stick a Clock in Me I’m Pregnant
The subject of when to have kids haunted Matt and me for about one year. For me, it always came down to career success. I couldn’t imagine being happy as a mother without publishing at least one book. I’d resent…
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Harpooning the Self: “Moby-Dick,” Fatphobia, and the Monomaniacal Pursuit of Control
But in our culture, it must be subdued, extracted, and of course sold. Their podcast has saved me in numerous ways these past years. Each morning, driving to my job at a small high school in the deep South, I…
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Two Poems
Slim hope that the brown paper plus plastic doggy bag will keep the fries from seeping their blood into my car seat.
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More Human: On Science Fairs, Artificial Intelligence, and Educational Experiments
My first-year composition students come to me much like that little dot in my sixth-grade science fair demonstration. They’ve spent years bumping around on a grid their teachers keep rearranging, and they’ve learned some things about how to navigate it.…
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Moving Past Shame into An Expanding: A Conversation with Belle Burden
“I was setting flame to not so much the particulars of life, but just the appearance of it and the rules that I was supposed to live by. Staying quiet about what happened to coming out of that lane to…
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Found Poem: South Carolina Instructional Materials Uniform Parent Complaint Form
On May 6, 2025, the South Carolina Board of Education voted to remove 10 books from all public schools for all grade levels. This brings the total to 22 books removed or restricted statewide in South Carolina public schools.
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On Arriving at My Partner’s Place to Meet His Mother
a mother calls to me and asks if i am her son’s partner. in her house, my laughter is careless and unpoised.
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My Personal Essay
There is an undercurrent to learning, a movement below the surface activity that pulls in the opposite direction. Sometimes a rip develops, a powerful surge that can carry you or drown you or maybe it generates just off to the…
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You Can’t Go Home Again: The Displacement and Grief in Aracelis Girmay’s “Green of All Heads”
Colonization is central in the web of elements that shape the book toward a mournful tone. Girmay sets us up knowing we are situated in an unstable reality. Point of view and even personhood are interchangeable. Identity is lost. Through…
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Enduring “The Long Walk”
Critics have also noted that several of the characters in the film are composites of characters from the book. They have pointed out that the filmmakers conflate two memorable characters from King’s novel—Scramm and Stebbins. In the book, Scramm is…
