After training as a journalist and spending years covering stories all over the world, I returned to my family home in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C. and began to listen in a deeper […]

TO: Right Brain
FROM: Me
SUBJECT: Annual Evaluation

Your full Annual Evaluation Report will be sent shortly but I want to go over some of the highlights briefly. First of all, thank you for finally returning […]

Her car was still sprinkled with debris from her recent move to the city. A misshapen yoga mat, tea towels, her boyfriend’s guitar pedals, a bedside lamp; the persisting clutter of merging lives. Wishing she’d tak […]

“Mother?” Plump, magnified, younger lips open and close. “Mother?”

How many years must she hear it? Mother Mother Mother. How many years already? The lips are those of a luminous fish suspended in water w […]

Have you sold a novel for a seven-figure advance? Yes? Then this post is not for you.

Still here? Skedaddle. Go write something. Yes? Okay.

Now that we’re all alone, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is […]

I often use this poem, The Summer Day by Mary Oliver, in my poetry workshops to demonstrate the importance of paying attention in the writing of poems:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black […]

Bobbie Ellen leaned against the wall of the arcade at Minnow Lake Campground and squinted at Nick Baker. The first wave of a thick Oklahoma summer had sent her inside with the rest of the gang, where the dark room […]

“I passed through Bologna once on the way to…” That’s how my favorite Italian city is usually featured in travel narratives. Tourists know its train station, a surprisingly modest building considering how m […]

I recently interviewed my friend, Sue Eisenfeld, about her creative nonfiction writing, and it turns out she’s taught a range of courses and workshops at Johns Hopkins University in creative nonfiction. She’s […]

I’ve kept an idea journal for as long as I can remember. Whenever a word, sentence or story idea strikes my fancy, I jot it down and date the entry.

One day, I thumbed through the pages, noticing dates on e […]

Wedding in Richmond
 

they’re roasting a pig at Tuckahoe Plantation
crowds gather on the grounds
where little Thomas Jefferson once lived
sweet jasmine tangles in the garden
banjos play on the […]

Just like the adage about loving yourself before being able to love another person, I’ve come to understand that in order to write with depth, you first have to learn to write about yourself. I grew up in a […]

Michael fled his village in South Sudan at the age of five. He trekked a thousand miles through war zones to arrive at a series of refugee camps where he lived for a decade. As a child at Kukuma Refugee Camp, […]

Snow Falls Off Bare Branch
 
At a reading, the poet responds to the art
of the Japanese woodblock. But I only see
the man’s head blocking my view,

white hair combed counterclockwise, hiding
terrain wh […]

As the new poetry editor of Streetlight, I find myself caught between the delights and demands of poetry and the nightmare of current events happening here in our nation and globally. I want to attempt to answer a […]