Krista Stevens

“I don’t know what the future will be, but I absolutely know that joy and the things that give us joy in this world, especially the natural world, are essential for everything.”

“Kabul changed years before the Taliban entered the city on August 15th, 2021, and yet in the news and in mainstream narratives, I find it presented as a surprise. Surprise, I find, is another word for wilful forgetting, a different shade of amnesia. A way to talk only of those who were “saved,” rather than […]

“At that moment I loved him completely — my grandfather, who could fix anything that broke down in all of Iowa, who made sauerkraut and homemade wine in the garage, who let me win at poker. I listened to him rage, and I heard every word that came spilling unfettered from the dark chambers of […]

“Then, an invitation arrived in my inbox: BE A CENSUS TAKER…At $25 an hour, the work was a potential lifeline. As a journalist, I was intrigued by the possibility of observing the enterprise—’the federal government’s largest and most complex peacetime operation,’ according to the National Research Council—up close. How, I wondered, could the government safely […]

“To know a language you need more than grammar and vocabulary; a language gains its life from memories. It is woven from all the voices you ever knew, from the daily noise of the street, from the quiet melodies of the authors you read, from jokes and songs and curses. I did not know this […]

“Other people can be intolerable on public transit, but they can be a comfort at the same time. They fill a raw need that we don’t always recognize.”

In the Northwest Territories, “…residents are quietly reclaiming their connection to their heritage. In backyards, fish and meat is smoked in teepees. Children listen to Dene language classes in their schools, and Elders teach youth how to hunt and be stewards of their homelands. This is resistance to oppression. This project focuses on how Dene […]

“This is what I do know, what I do remember with perfect clarity. When the station wagon hit the convertible, a camera came flying out of the convertible and landed on the sandy strip next to the car. It was a Kodak Instamatic, the kind that took a rotating flash cube. Our family owned one […]