LitHub

An essay in which author and academic Angela Pelster-Wiebe considers the best ways for white authors and artists to quit side-stepping the subjects of deeply rooted structural racism and their own privilege, and help dismantle white supremacy with their work.

“My family was a series of hushed rages behind shut doors…In my family, love was the slow accumulation of moments in which I was not subjected to great harm.”

One journalist speaks with immigrants to learn what life is like in the center of America’s immigration, and moral, crisis.

Sonya Huber explores how pain and chronic illness has shaped her and her writing process.

A poet learns how to deal emotionally with the reality of climate change.

An essay excerpted from So You Want to Talk About Race in which Ijeoma Oluo writes about a messy, uncomfortable, and important conversation she had with her white mother about race and racism.

Miranda Weiss on moving to Alaska — 3,000 miles away from her parents — and choosing to stay there.

After generations of resistance and trauma, the descendants of Geronimo, an important leader of the Chiricahua Apache, travel to Mexico to perform a ceremony of forgiveness. But it’s difficult to forgive a nation that built itself on genocide.

A personal essay by poet Patrick Rosal — an excerpt of We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America, edited by Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page. The piece is framed as a letter to a white woman who mistook him for a server at the black-tie National Book Awards gala, which he had attended in a $90 polyester suit, in support of a friend who was being honored.

The author of Wide Sargasso Sea was an eternal exile, but that otherness, and the Caribbean, deeply influenced her writing.