Alison’s Stine’s debut novel “Road Out of Winter” is a book whose setting compels the reader to keep reading—both for the devastation of the current state of affairs, and for the mournfully beautiful loss. Rather than the warming that has been on our radar for decades, or the deadly fear of a nuclear holocaust, or even the coronavirus debacle pickling our planet, Stine’s is a world that has painted Appalachia, an already impoverished farming community, white with snow—all year, for the second year in a row.
Author: Geri Lipschultz
Geri Lipschultz has published in the New York Times, the Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English and others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She teaches writing at Hunter College and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Geri was awarded a Creative Artists in Public Service grant from New York State. Her one-woman show "Once Upon the Present Time" was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr.
How to Be Yourself and Change the World in the Process
In Stephanie Davies’s coming of age, coming-out memoir, “Other Girls Like Me,” she recounts her involvement with the Greenham common peace camp in Great Britain. Davies’s involvement in this activist movement pulled her into a reimagining of self and helps her to heal the exacerbated relationship with her family.
“See No Stranger”: To Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable
A Review of Valarie Kaur’s “See No Stranger: A Memoir & Manifesto of Revolutionary Love”: Embedded in this compendium of stories, theories, philosophies, practices and prayer-poems, is both an East Asian and U.S. history told through the lens of a courageous, young, female Sikh activist, filmmaker and lawyer. The narrative is a weaving of stories with an infusion of Sikh culture and feminist theory, grounded in scholarship and extensive footwork.
Dispatches from an NYC (Virtual) Classroom: Teaching in the Time of COVID
“My NYC community college students are struggling to survive, some of them literally. As a writer myself, and as a teacher of writing for almost forty years, I’m always reminded: When there is nothing left to hold onto, sometimes there are words.”
A Light into the Negative Space
One does not open a book by Lidia Yuknavitch carelessly. Just as one does not bend down to pick up a child carelessly, or a sculpture of a child carelessly, or the coffin of a child carelessly. There is weight, almost too much weight to bear, in a Lidia Yuknavitch book.
The Voices of Collateral Damage
What makes Abigail DeWitt’s “News of Our Loved Ones” compelling is the compression of the story, the variety of points of view and the sheer elegance of the prose that transforms her own family’s history—and world history along with it—into a powerful act of fiction.