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I grew up with a vigorous love for reading and storytelling. There was (and still is) a sense of ethereal magic that occurs when reading about other people, real or fiction, other worlds, other perspectives. At the time, I wasn’t looking to books for people who looked like me; I was looking for something outside myself. Eventually, though, I wanted to see myself reflected in the works I read—or at least know that it was possible, that other people reading fiction for other perspectives might fin

When I teach Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch,” the first in her collection Her Body and Other Parties, to my fiction workshops, it’s unlike teaching any other story. For one thing, the men in class don’t speak. I’m not sure if, like me, they don’t know what to say, something I admit before we begin. “I don’t quite know how to discuss this story,” I say. “I’m really having us read it because I love it.” Or maybe they feel like they shouldn’t because it is, among other things, a s

With the recent release of the Hulu original series The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1984 novel by the same name has once again entered the public consciousness. And, at a time when legislators have voted to defund Planned Parenthood and our country has seen the election of a man accused of sexually assaulting no less than seventeen women, the dystopian story about an America in which women are gradually stripped of their rights rings eerily true. However, one of the most disturbing and of

merica is a country that claims to love mothers and thinks they’re doing the most important job in the world, but also kind of wants mothers to just shut up about it. The effectiveness of “mom” (or, better yet, “mommy”) as a prefix for anything you’d like to label frivolous shows how little we think of actual mothers: mommy blog, mom lit, mom hair. You can buy a mug to put your “mom fuel” in at Target and carry it to school dropoff while you wear a #momlife t shirt, if you’d like to treat mother

I was born in 1984, and I took the beauty lessons of the era to heart from a young age. My first concept of beauty wasn’t so much about the presence of anything, but the absence of what I then saw as flaws.  My first beauty role model was Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years, who seemed to me perfectly beautiful because (to my eyes) she had no imperfection. Winnie had big eyes, a small nose, a big mouth, and impossibly glossy hair. It was around this time that I broke my nose badly in an accident

Passing is a work of fiction, but it is a true story about the world in which its author, Nella Larsen, lived. To describe it simply as a novel about a black woman passing for white would be to ignore the multiple layers of its concerns. Passing is about the monumental cultural transformations that took place in American society after World War I. It is about changing definitions of concepts like race and gender, and the inextricable relationship between whiteness and blackness. I