If You Don’t Know, Now You Know: Talking with Joseph Rios
Joseph Rios discusses his debut collection, SHADOWBOXING: POEMS AND IMPERSONATIONS.
...more
Posts Tagged: immigrant
Which Flame Is Mine?: A Conversation with Rajiv Mohabir
Rajiv Mohabir discusses his second collection, The Cowherd’s Son, his work as a translator, and resisting erasure in a racist America.
...more
Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
...more
Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
In Thousand Star Hotel, the bilingual writer’s struggle with expressing himself in English becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s struggle with navigating the host nation’s hostile-yet-lucrative social terrain.
...more
TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
...more
Color Is a Language in Itself: Mahtem Shiferraw Discusses Fuchsia
Mahtem Shiferraw discusses her debut collection, Fuchsia, how she uses color to understand the world and to communicate, and why her work continually addresses displacement.
...more
On Making Wishes
It is true that I’m talking to a photo, but I’m not crazy. Neither am I a durochka. Fools are oblivious, at least those from my childhood fairy tales. I, on the other hand, am perfectly aware of the problem.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, Joyland posted the winner and runners-up of its 2017 Open Border Fiction Prize. The price was open to writing or translation in English from any country in the world and was judged this year by Amelia Gray (Gutshot, 2015). The first-place winner is Jenny Xie’s “Lucky Frank,” a short story about a young girl, […]
...more
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Claudia Cortese Discusses Wasp Queen
Poet Claudia Cortese talks about her new book Wasp Queen and Lucy, the rebellious 90s teen whose voice inspired the collection.
...more
Vincent Toro: Challenging Whiteness and Refusing to Be Colonized
Poet Vincent Toro on his debut collection, Stereo.Island.Mosaic, his writing process, and searching for identity.
...more
Looking for Russia in America
Everyone around us is speaking Russian, and I feel like we are in Russia, the old one, before the wall came down. For a moment, I even feel like I belong.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, C Pam Zhang has a flash fiction story at The Offing that is maybe about vampires but probably about girls, Chinese girls in particular. “Are They Vampires, or Are They Just Chinese?” is written in five brief paragraphs of atmospheric prose that is beautiful and barbed at the same time, like cotton candy […]
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chris Santiago
Chris Santigo on his new collection Tula, writing a multilingual text, and the connections between music and writing poetry.
...more
The Real Fidel
In a flash nearly 200,000 Cuban refugees understood that we’d lost our homeland and had better get used to life en la Yuma. We packed for six weeks, and we stayed for six decades.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua discusses her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, writing fiction in order to understand life as an American-born child of immigrants, and the importance of literary community.
...more
Multitudes: The Practice of Forgetting
I want to say it must matter. Because history is erased from our veins when we allow ourselves to forget where we came from.
...moreThe America We Live in Now
I don’t consider myself a political person. To me, there are no “wrong” political beliefs. I believe that democracy means respecting everyone’s right to her opinion. And if I were forced to declare my own political views, I would have to reluctantly admit that, out of cynicism and self-interest, I find myself increasingly leaning towards […]
...more