L: Artist Mel Chin; R: Cover of good, designed by Mel Chin (2000) I met Mel Chin twenty-two years ago when I was invited to submit an essay for...
Read more11 Jun, 2021
13 Mar, 2021
a year has passed…
13 Mar, 2021
my family began the year by ordering black and gray masks but have now accumulated patterns that we can match with our clothes One year has slipped away since...
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 more14 Mar, 2020
charcoal, cancellations, & social distancing…
14 Mar, 2020
Yesterday, I took blank paper and charcoal and zero instructions for my storytelling workshop participants The situation changes from one hour to the next, and the conversations that I...
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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