L: “On Belonging – community responses to home and the pandemic” at McDonald Park; photo by a Pasadena parks employee; R: The live oak tree after being stripped of...
Read more07 Oct, 2021
04 Jun, 2021
gaza sunset…
04 Jun, 2021
photo of sunset over Gaza by Hadeel Assali This morning, I called Hadeel Assali, a friend from Houston, Texas who recently defended her dissertation at Columbia University. I had...
Read more01 Feb, 2021
south asian writers resist…
01 Feb, 2021
zoom screenshot featuring: (top row L to R): Beyond Baroque Executive Director Quentin Ring, me, Shreerekha Subramanian; (middle row L to R): Mahmud Rahman, Torsa Ghosal, Neelanjana Banerjee; (bottom...
Read more28 Dec, 2020
IGTV conversation with ali zaidi…
28 Dec, 2020
On Thursday, December 17, Ali Zaidi and I engaged in an IGTV conversation about memory versus truth in which we revisited our intersection 33 years ago in Lahore. For...
Read more16 Sep, 2020
burning up…
16 Sep, 2020
More than 30 fires are burning up along the Pacific coastline. Closer to us, the Bobcat fire started up on September 6, and expanded from 33,000 acres to 45,000...
Read more27 May, 2020
week 11: honoring legacy…
27 May, 2020
Yesterday, more than 50 invited family members and friends from around the world signed in on Zoom to celebrate my father and share stories about him. The baithak was...
Read more24 Apr, 2020
“the present is a transit lounge…”
24 Apr, 2020
Arundhati Roy talking with Imani Perry on YouTube; organized by Haymarket Books Yesterday morning, I disrupted my schedule to listen to Arundhati Roy’s conversation with Imani Perry, The Pandemic...
Read more30 Mar, 2020
on lockdown with the rest of the world…
30 Mar, 2020
Week 1: a Saturday evening sunset at Redondo Beach, a site that is now closed Week One (March 16-22): Two weeks ago, all schools in Los Angeles and most...
Read more29 Oct, 2019
unexpected intersections…
29 Oct, 2019
Selfies: With Bettina Ng’weno (L); Sharon Fabriz (R) “I remember us facilitating Rice Writing Project sessions at the Rice School and how even then you had the title in mind....
Read more18 Sep, 2019
the next “on belonging” installment…
18 Sep, 2019
“You could do a reading at Scripps and create an installation,” Myriam Chancy offered when I showed her images from my On Belonging site-specific installation at Houston’s Menil Collection...
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