By David Laskin   After a long career successful in narrative nonfiction (The Children’s Blizzard, The Long Way Home, The Family), I decided a few years ago to jump the fence to fiction. My first novel, What Sammy Knew, is the story of a high school senior named Sammy Stein who, in the first months

By: Susan B. Inches As a career environmental advocate, I am always looking to train and mentor young students and leaders who can take up this work. In doing so, I created an undergraduate course, “Advocating for the Environment”. The course has been well received by faculty and students at two liberal arts colleges: Bates

By: Jess McHugh   Who gets to tell the American story?   That was the question that preoccupied me in the years of researching and writing Americanon. I was fascinated by the ways in which commonplace books, owned by millions of Americans—from almanacs to primers to cookbooks—shaped and reshaped American identity over generations of reading.

Editor John Freeman reflects on his journey with the world of short stories in light of the upcoming release of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story.  Click here  to see the full Table of Contents for The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story.   The Penguin Book of the Modern

By: Suzanne McConnell As a teacher of fiction writing at Hunter College, I was always on the look-out for a book to use in classes that was instructive but not academic.  I wanted a non-textbook text that was compelling, entertaining, encouraging, and practical – one that delivered helpful news about writing in such a way

Dear Educators: A few years ago, when I began to focus more on entrepreneurial pursuits, my mom, a former writer herself, gifted me a little book titled Passion: Every Day. It was filled with inspiring quotes like “I dare you, while there is still time, to have a magnificent obsession” and “follow your desire as long as

Contributed by Jessica Brody, author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (Ten Speed Press, 2018).   In 2005, I was a walking cliché: a struggling writer attempting to sell my first novel, living in a studio apartment wallpapered with rejection letters. I had recently been laid off from my corporate job as a financial

It has often been pointed out – first by the Greek poet Archilochus, and then more thoroughly in an essay by Isaiah Berlin – that writers can be classified as foxes, who know and are interested in a wide variety of different things, or as hedgehogs, who specialize, burrowing deeply into a single issue or

In this urgent chronicle of contemporary immigration, Lauren Markham offers an unforgettable testament to the migrant experience.

Antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo explores the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, and how these reactions maintain racial inequality.

Daisy Hernández’s memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed is organized into three parts: family life, sexuality, and class mobility.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off people alike. Eviction—the forced removal of families from