Review: When Stars Are Scattered
Life for most individuals is hard. Life for a young boy in a refugee camp, struggling to support himself and his brother, is nearly impossible. Imagine waking up with a constant pang of hunger and...
Category: Books
A message worth sharing: revisiting The Joy Luck Club
“I made a promise to myself: I would always remember my parents’ wishes, but I would never forget myself.” This was only one of many powerful quotes within Amy Tan’s debut novel, The Joy...
Tori Amos’s Resistance is a solid, insightful musical memoir
I am an unabashed fan of Tori Amos. I have been a fan of hers for over 20 years now, and although I don’t self-identify as an EWF—Ears With Feet, her term for her fans—I’ve seen her in...
Scary monsters and super creeps
I have been fascinated by monsters from an early age. I can’t remember when it started, but at some point during my childhood, I began to think that vampires, phantoms (specifically, the Phantom of...
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s Care Work is an Outstanding Collection of Essays on Disability Justice
Writer, poet, performer, and author Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s published work—including the memoir Dirty River and poetry collections Bodymap, Love Cake, and Consensual Genocide—has...
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s Sketchtasy Might Be the Best Novel of Fall 2018
First, a confession: I am not totally sure how to start this review. On its surface, the job of a book reviewer is simple: describe the book, perhaps situate it in some sort of context (genre,...
We can do better on depictions of adoption in pop culture
In December of 2017, I had an opportunity to review Welcome Home, a collection of short stories centered on adoption edited by Eric Smith. The stories collected here represent such a wide spectrum of...
Michele Lent Hirsch’s Invisible is a Must Read For Those With—and Without—Chronic Illness
For the past week and a half or so, I have been dealing with a shoulder/back injury that has cut my productivity down to the nub. I don’t know how I injured myself, so I suspect that this muscle...
Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim asks tough questions of disability studies
Note: In the interest of full disclosure, Puar cites a short article that I wrote in 2014 for Bitch Magazine on inspiration porn and “what’s your excuse” workout memes. I was not aware of this...
Ageism in Youth Studies: Generation Maligned Covers an Important Topic, But Has a Flawed Execution
There is a current glut of opinion columns, essays, and speculative pieces that all suggest that millennials—generally defined as young people born between 1980 and the late 1990s, although...