Lolly Bowean writes that every black woman has a hair biography. Hers includes an aunt with “growing hands,” a cousin who straightened her hair against her mother’s wishes, and a disastrous teenage Jheri curl. Eventually, she comes to realize that for black women, finding the right hairstyle isn’t about looking like everyone else — it’s […]
family
Posted inCrime, Nonfiction, Quotes
How to (Almost) Get Away With Murder
No one twigged that whenever a member of the Harrison family died, it was always just before an important hearing in a bitter child custody battle.
Posted inBooks, Current Events, Essays & Criticism, Story
Here is My Heart
Long after the shooting at her old high school, Megan Stielstra worries about her father’s heart. Part one of a three-part series on gun violence.
Posted inEvents, Nonfiction, Quotes
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: Washing the Pillow Cases Every Day
Chappell Ellison would have done anything to ease her brother’s suffering from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals
In this moving lyric essay on grief, pain, and the body’s frailty, Ellen Wayland-Smith recalls, with heart-wrenching intimacy, how bodies have failed and fallen in her own life, and reflects on various literary and historical reckonings with the finality of death and the inevitability of the fall.
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’
A personal essay in which reporter Alice Driver considers what lessons to take from a late uncle’s life.
Posted inEditor's Pick, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’
Alice Driver considers what lessons to take from a late uncle’s life.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
‘Forgive Yourself. And Forgive Me.’
Alice Driver considers what lessons to take from a late uncle’s life.
Posted inEditor's Pick
How to Write a Memoir While Grieving
A personal essay in which Nicole Chung contemplates loss, adoption, and working on a book her late father won’t get to see.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
How to Write a Memoir While Grieving
Nicole Chung contemplates loss, adoption, and working on a book her late father won’t get to see.