Empire made English my mother tongue—and the only one I have any real dominion over.

In English, Hindi, and Bangla—the languages I use daily—we spoke only of death and distress.

We will need new maps as well as the courage and humor of travelers who won’t hesitate to stick their heads outside the sphere of the world-up-to-this-point, beyond the horizon of existing dictionaries and encyclopedias.

I allowed myself to be very playful and unafraid, and to try everything.

Today, a young writer working in Spanish arrives in New York City to find no shortage of role models.

Completely unaware that this was the kind of sacred moment when you pledge your undying allegiance to a team, through thick and thin, I stated my choice.

On a bad night, a train car on the red line takes more than half an hour to appear, and no fewer than twenty-one minutes to traverse the eleven stations to the southern tip of Manhattan.

While many Latinx writers work in English, there is a longstanding tradition of writers born or raised in this country who work in Spanish.

His lips are moist, as though he were stewing on more insults.

All she can think about is why it ever occurred to her to dress like this in public.

He checked Mel’s Instagram and Twitter accounts again, waiting anxiously for her to post something, anything.

Language is more than just a method of communication. It is about the ability to lay down roots, to settle into an identity, to have a place in history, in the present, and in the future. Language is…

Watch Khadija Tracey Heeger read her poem “Children of the Xam” in the original Kaaps.Poet Khadija Tracey Heeger honors a rich and complex heritage.Between the vertebrae of the Langeberg…

Watch the music video for “Affirm” performed by SIEP, in the original Kaaps.This rap performance by SIEP uplifts and speaks truth.I affirm the soul in each personI affirm the soul in each…

It should be patently obvious to anyone but the most resolutely blind that he is not aching with impatience to go to the house of the Lord.

Where moving out is mostly in a coffin

and that which has no use will be discarded

JB was the one to start that fire inside my head.

For multilingual writers, choosing to write in their heritage languages can be seen as an expression of agency, an active choice to communicate in a nondominant language.

to the rain looming over mexico city open your jaws for us make kids laugh dogs bark

Linguistic threads. IV lines and blood cells. Oppressive silencing. There is a viscerality that emerges when sitting with Rahma Nur’s poem “Fili Linguistici.” In describing her experience as…

Afro-Italian poet Rahma Nur describes her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy, noting how language marks the body and how it shapes one’s sense of loss.As you make headwaybetween…

Afro-Italian poet Rahma Nur describes her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy, noting how language marks the body and how it shapes one’s sense of loss.In the step that you takeBetween…

Afro-Italian poet Rahma Nur describes her experience as a member of a diaspora living in Italy, noting how language marks the body and how it shapes one’s sense of loss.In that step you takebetween…

What is national literature and how is it defined? Often, when one thinks of a particular nation or language, they imagine a specific phenotype tied to a historical narrative. A cursory Google search…

Somali-Italian writer Igiaba Scego recalls her childhood experiences in the Italian educational system in this memoir.

But if you drink and breathe and sweat and love in a country that is no longer yours, then you are not a migrant. You are a man.

In your opinion, why'd he do it?

Writer Marie Moïse describes her search for her roots and traces her family’s history of cross-Atlantic displacement.I spent my youth seeking to recover my roots, which were severed by migration…

Mauritanian literature foregrounds characters on the move.

“The central server is under attack and receiving commands to self-destruct.”

Listen, all of you, to what will later be said of the Forsaken by one of their descendants.

Their nayffara is a flutelike instrument heavy with history, deeply immersed in sorrow.

You will say to them that she sleeps in the calabash of worlds

Here the poem ends

What you are witnessing is the last face of the Earth.

The scope of the topics explored in this issue is, therefore, necessarily broad without being comprehensive.

So began many long months of conversation between Alberte and his horse.

These writings spark immediate conversations through rapid-fire literary texts rather than typical online commentary.

nothing is certain but and taxes

It was an Hunahpúan effort to choose only four poems from this extraordinarily strong pool of poems.

Some of them have often called upon their Chinese or Japanese roots; others have alighted upon the topic only a few times, if at all.

“She was hot, your aunt Carmen, / she didn’t look Chinese.”

A real work of Amerindian literature makes perceptible another way of ordering and being in the world.

Silvio wanted to escape, race across the sown fields with his long rhea legs until he reached some place where no one could see him.

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.

Women were confined to reading prayer books and religious hymns. And they wrote in the margins. Centuries went by. Those marginalia are, in fact, the books I need to read.

Robert Louis Stevenson says that to tour lighthouses is “to visit past centuries.”

A dispiriting narrowness has defined canons of Urdu feminist writing from previous decades.

Her sagacity immortalized even her scattered, sporadic axioms.

In a world reimagining its cultural and political axes, Welsh-language literature gives voice to an experience more necessary and valuable now than ever.

I have become Japanese and I am no longer a Welshwoman.

It happened so quickly. The End.

Yes, there was a shadow there.