ARTICLES & REVIEWS

“Can Words Help Heal A Fractured Nation?: A Visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival”
Three Muslim girls — two sisters and their cousin — stood in the sunshine on the grounds of the Diggi Palace Hotel in Jaipur, where the world’s largest literary festival took place over five days in late January. All around them, young people streamed into the sprawling compound, before a pandemic changed the world, girls in skinny jeans and sunglasses, college boys with a casual swagger.
Los Angeles Review of Books 

“The Concubine Culture Is Alive and Well”
In 2009, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan found herself hanging out in Singapore with a group of newly divorced high school friends who had started calling themselves “sarong party girls.”
Slate 

“’70s era rabble-rouser Rosemary Daniell nurtures new writers”
The red Mustang parked on a manicured property in Buckhead belongs to Rosemary Daniell. Once the bad girl of Southern letters who shook the literary establishment of the 1970s with her feminist essays and sexually explicit poems, Daniell has come up from Savannah to lead the monthly Zona Rosa writers group.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  

“Black Deutschland by Daryl Pinckney”
Darryl Pinckney’s quietly provocative new novel, Black Deutschland, appears 24 years after his impressive debut, High Cotton, and revisits the dilemmas of black identity. Jed Goodfinch, a young African-American writer, is fleeing the constrictions of race in America.
The Rumpus 

“Film of Midnight’s Children humanizes Salman Rushdie’s epic novel of India”
“Pakistan was the great mistake of his parents, the blunder that had deprived him of his home.” So writes Salman Rushdie in his recent memoir Joseph Anton, speaking of himself in the third person, as if the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for his execution had turned him into one of his improbable fictional characters.
ArtsATL  

“Exhilarating ‘Goddess, Lio, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art”
In 1947, India became a new country — free and hopeful, yet traumatized and mutilated at the same time. The last ships of the British Empire sailed away, vast territories were lopped off at partition to form West and East Pakistan, and a million people were killed in murderous violence between Hindus and Muslims. This bloody year of liberation gave rise to India’s modern art movement.
ArtsATL

INTERVIEWS

“Freedom from Sugarcane Hell: An Interview with Vinod Busjeet”
I met Vinod Busjeet a few summers ago in Denver, where several of us writers of Indian origin found ourselves together in a workshop at the Lighthouse Lit Fest. I remember thinking his elegance and erudition were impressive.
The Paris Review

“The Everyday Extraordinary”
It may be that Kevin Young’s poetic sensibility—his focus on remembrance, his affinity for the blues—was shaped by his exile from the South.
Guernica

 “Building in Verse”
When the Presidential Inaugural Committee invited the poet Richard Blanco to pen some verse for Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony in January 2013, Blanco had been living with his partner in Bethel, Maine, and volunteering his spare hours at the local planning board.
Guernica

 “Drugs, Violence and Black Men Dying Young in Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Men We Reaped’”
In 2000, novelist Jesmyn Ward’s only brother, Joshua, was driving home from his job as a parking valet at a Mississippi Gulf coast casino when he was struck by a drunken driver and died. Two years later, a boy whom Ward had once supervised at a summer camp killed himself.
ArtsATL

 “Isabel Wilkerson’s Odyssey Before and After Publishing ‘The Warmth of Other Suns’”
Like many great stories, Isabel Wilkerson’s much-acclaimed history of black migration northward, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” began at home. It began in the silences her parents kept.
ArtsATL