daniel pena
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Voting Across the Pages
The political becoming local and, in effect, personal, is what I think we saw playing out all across Columbia last week. If Ocosingo War Diary teaches us anything, it’s that what might seem like an obvious choice—ending a war of…
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What’s in a Name?
But as writers, what are we supposed to do if we have a super common name? Do we get a pen name? Do we find an SEO expert? Do we just kind of ignore the issue and hope our names…
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Afrofuturist Worries
Underwriting the words on that page are the counterposing sentiments I see in many writers I know, especially writers of color: At one pole there’s, I just want to be okay; I want my family/community to be okay. At the…
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Reshaping Humanities in the Middle East
Though every time I hear it, I can’t help but cringe a little. It reeks of insularity. Have you read what’s coming out of the Arab world right now? I thought when I heard that question again this year. That’s…
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The Empathy of Latin America
I can’t say I was surprised by the level of empathy my barber expressed for the victims of the Paris attacks, though I was intrigued by the empathy of a man whose daily life is so intertwined with the drug…
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The Rumpus Interview with Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman talks about the Narvarte Murders, Ayotzinapa, and the stories he feels most responsible for telling now.
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Building a World with All Kinds of Violence
A good story resides in a world all its own, and I wanted to have the reader understand quickly what this world was like, a world where some people like Toño “La Perra” Becerra have a hard on for violence…
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Making the Latino Renaissance More Radical
This is the difference between U.S. Latina/o letters and Latina/o Letters from Latin America: In the United States, writing is a business. In Latin America, writing is life and death. At the Ploughshares blog, Daniel Peña argues that Latina/o fiction in…
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Art is What We Buy
Literature and commercial publishing have a diversity problem. People of color and women are both in short supply. Rumpus contributor Daniel Peña, writing at Plougshares, offers a market-based explanation: But I wonder how much these problems stem not from MFA…