At dusk I liked to sit out on the front stoop of my building and watch the people coming and going. Betty Amurrio’s cousins hung out in front, too, in the parking lot, listening to salsa blaring from their lowrider. I liked the graceful way they gestured at each...
The earth was cracked and troubled in Washington, D.C. If only you’d been listening, you would have decoded the garbled whisperings of Auntie Kay’s rapid decline, a sampaguita wilting, just like your bleeding hearts in summer, hot as morning mouth. Instead, you...
As the family neared the compound, they caught their first glimpse of The Bakers. A dozen girls in long floral dresses with golden hair in elaborate braids walked along the side of the road. Each carried a woven basket covered with checked cloth, like the one Little...
Excerpt from the memoir manuscript Good Fortune Next Time: Life, Death, Irony, and the Non-Profit Management of Very Small Colleges December 13, 1993 When Rod Gander, the president of Marlboro College and my boss, climbed down from the hissing, dripping 6:00...
I can’t say what came first: my desire to write fantasy or my desire to play Dungeons & Dragons. I just know that they are and always have been inextricably linked in my imagination. I read fantasy from the age of four or five, but the realization that I...
