Category: Nonfiction

by Afsheen Farhadi       Our fifth-grade math class was getting new seating assignments, a ritual I didn’t understand and even now can only reason as some sort of prison tactic to ensure no alliances formed between students. It might also have been a social training exercise, evidenced by the fact that the rows of three alternated…

by Jean McDonough Monday, January 20, 2025 Dear Pablo Picasso, I am writing to inform you that patrons of the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, Spain, are now allowed to take selfies in front of Guernica, your Spanish Civil War painting that illustrates the terror bombing of a small Basque town on April 26, 1937—forgive…

by Mia Herman       I was thirteen when I first found out that I had scoliosis.      I didn’t even know what it was, really. Or what it meant. But after the first round of X-rays, the orthopedist said there was a forty percent chance I’d need back surgery.      “We’ll need to watch her,” she warned my mom like…

by Alice Hatcher       The sole survivor of the car crash that claimed the lives of three high school seniors, including my best friend’s cousin, D, was the last person to arrive for the funeral Mass. She arrived alone and took a seat at the back of the church, as if she had no claim to…

by Katie Leonard       They’re very common, you know, not even something you can control, just something you get, something some women are more prone to than others, like stretch marks and boyfriends and a heavy flow. A genetic component—primordial destiny.       I was moving apartments. Hot summer, twenty-three years old. Fifth-floor walkup to fourth-story elevator building,…

by Alison Mandaville Rape      This is not an essay about rape.      This is an essay about memory and forgetting. Judge      Seven years ago, I found myself writing, revising, and sending two-page, personal, in-depth letters to Jeff Flake and Susan Collins, both Republican senators representing states where I have never lived. It is unlikely they would ever read the…

by Andrew Cominelli       In early 2021, I write a short piece of fiction based on a real-life suicide. In the story, a mother and her middle-aged daughter sit at a table, mostly in silence four decades after the tragic death occurred. The story is about their inability to talk about the dead boy, a brother…

by Suphil Lee Park       As Uncle Seung’s hand reached for my waist, I wondered for a moment whether he was going to give me a ride on his shoulder. I awkwardly froze, halfway holding my arms out, as his hand left something in the kangaroo’s pouch of my favorite overalls. I had turned seven just…

by Annabel Li Born and raised in Shanghai, Annabel Li loves writing and surfing.

by Ophelia D. Knight       Tell them you love them. Tell them not to worry. Tell them that things happen. Tell them that you’ll be fine without them; explain that you’ll miss them but you’ll live. Tell them that you will send letters filled with love and news of your everyday life. Tell them that you…