This post originally appeared in Good Letters on October 20, 2011 In the last few years, my school has made a huge push towards what our Global Studies’ Director refers to as “glocalism.” In essence, glocalism encapsulates the idea that we are all of us citizens of various communities, both local and global, and that…

This past week, I taught my last English class for quite some time. Three years ago, I moved to my new city in the Midwest. Almost right away, I started teaching literacy to people (mostly women, mostly older, all East African refugees) who have been denied access to education. The levels of trauma, displacement, oppression,…

I possessed a consummate ideology before I had children. It was a perfectly distilled comprehension of man, God, and government. I knew with certainty that if everyone would just turn off the television and read Important Books, we could live alongside one another the way the Almighty intended when he crafted laws of the universe…

Here is a poem that silently enacts a conversion.  The poem starts off with a string of scornful terms for the speaker’s new neighbors, culminating in the almost mean pun on their child’s “grin” as “grim.” But right after this, the speaker begins to soften her terms: she notices a “warmth” in this noisy, dirty,…

I looked up from washing dishes one morning last spring and saw a cluster of women in Islamic dress walking away from the school bus stop outside our window. They wandered off by pairs or threes, hijabs with hijabs, niqabs with niqabs, away into the side streets. My hands slowed in the water, my baby…

During a lecture last March, I spoke fondly of a friend whom I had recently lost to cancer. Halfway through the anecdote, I suddenly recognized his wife, the mother of his two young children, in the audience, listening in rapt attention. She was far from home, a surprise visitor. I almost choked. And I suddenly…