When I hear the “All Things Considered” theme, I hear vegetables sizzling in a pan. I think about being 6 years old and playing with toys at the kitchen table while my mom cooked dinner and caught up with … Read more
Last fall, I sat in on a class at Harvard University filled with students who were working on graduate degrees in higher education. The professor posed a simple but enlightening question. She asked how many of us had attended … Read more
Growing up, if my sister and I were reading, we didn’t have to do chores. So, we read all the time. We loved a good story. My mother wanted us to read work by the poets. Gwendolyn Brooks was … Read more
Iwas 5 or 6 years old when my mother, a great lover of Nigerian folklore, told me a story from one of the oldest tribes in my country. In my mother’s telling, the market woman named Emotan became a … Read more
I have lived most of my adult life out of a single suitcase, zigzagging a career through the Caucasus and the Middle East. But I had never plumbed for inspiration or reason. In the introduction to my first book I … Read more
Soon after starting high school in Tg. Mures, the small city in Romania’s Transylvania region where I grew up, I began skipping classes. What we want is to give voice to stories nobody has heard, to people who’ve … Read more
Photo by Finbarr O’ReillyComing to Harvard was a dream come true—but it was also the hardest thing I’ve ever done. For much of this year my husband and our two … Read more
