Interview by Timmy Miller and Thia Paruchuru The following conversation is part of an ongoing series called Memories in Exile, in which we interview current and former resident writers who have come to Pittsburgh and lived in exile on Sampsonia Way. The series is in celebration of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s ...

The following conversation is part of an ongoing series called Memories in Exile, in which we interview current and former resident writers who have come to Pittsburgh and lived in exile on Sampsonia Way. The series is in celebration of City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s 15th year, capturing the diverse experiences of ...

After their rehearsal for their City of Asylum reading, Roy Guzmán was kind enough to sit down and chat about poetry, language, and what words mean in times of strife. Guzmán is a Honduran-born, Miami-raised poet based out of Minneapolis. They came down to City of Asylum this September for ...

Osama Alomar settles into his home in Pittsburgh’s North Side and opens up Skype. In Quebec, Canada, more than 750 miles away, C.J. Collins sits at his desk, pulls a set of headphones over his ears, and does the same. For about eight hours a week, the pair work off ...

In February, Ross Gay visited Alphabet City to launch his newest release, The Book of Delights, an essay collection in which he explores the ordinary and beautiful moments, things, and people he encounters in his day-to-day life. Prior to his reading, he took the time to visit with Sampsonia Way staff writers Sarah Gross and Maggie Medoff to chat about his ...

This is the second of two segments featuring Brazilian writer Marcia Tiburi. The following excerpt is from her 2015 philosophical treatise How to Talk to Fascists and is Tiburi’s English-language debut. To learn about Tiburi’s story of exile, read her interview with Maya Best. How to Talk to Fascists by ...

This is the first of two segments featuring Marcia Tiburi. The following interview is an introduction to her life as a writer, scholar, and activist. For the second segment, read the English-translated excerpt of her philosophical treatise How to Talk to Fascists. In the final weeks of her residency at ...

Love Letter DEAR MINERVA: I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that the flowers of my feelings blossomed in the spring of your beauty with its powers of birth and its shining radiance in all parts of the globe all at once. Do you remember how we ...

From the beginning of his career, Osama Alomar decided writing would be his identity. The Syrian novelist and poet became well known in Syria, and now in the United States, for his mastery of the Arabic al-qisa al-qasira jiddan: very short stories that are written with the speed and incision ...

Tuhin Das, current ICORN writer-in-residence of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, stands in front of Burma House on Sampsonia Way. Photo by Renee Rosensteel. All rights reserved. Tuhin Das says, “If I return to Bangladesh, I will be killed.” Since 2013, he has been the target of fundamentalist groups who ...

In this edition of The Writer’s Block, Yaghoub Yadali discusses his novel Rituals of Restlessness, newly translated by City of Asylum. Yaghoub Yadali, a fiction writer from Iran, is City of Asylum’s newest writer-in-residence. He has directed for television and was an editor of Roshd magazine. He is the author ...

First Story Lili divided the mashed potato into two parts and put each on a plate. Lili wished she had some carrots to put next to the mash. That way Danial would get a little bit of vitamins. There was still some money left from the sale of Danial’s novel, ...

My name is Huang Xiang. I was born in 1941 on December 26 in Wugang in Guidong county Hunan province. My father was a general. I was raised by my paternal grandparents. China was so was ruled by a dictator and everything was supposed to be seen how the government ...

Before the Tiananmen Massacre took place on June 4, 1989, I had been engaged in literary activities at five universities in Beijing. In 1987, I was charged with “disturbing peace of society” and incarcerated in Wang Wu Labor Camp in Guiyang, Guizhou Province. After the Tiananmen incident, I was placed ...

“If You Have Some Kind Of Sensibility Towards Injustice, You Know What Rage Is.” Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras and raised in El Salvador. Throughout his career as a journalist and author, he has lived in Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Germany and Japan, among others. In 2006 he came ...

In October 1978 Huang Xiang, Li Jiahua, Fang Jiahua, and Mo Jiangang traveled from Guiyang to the capital for the first time. Arriving on the tenth, they posted the inaugural issue of the underground journal Enlightenment on a wall in downtown Beijing. Huang also recited his long poem “God of ...

The First Intimation A tree appears in February. God knows how many trees there are in the world that look just like it, but for me there is only one. It flashes outside the train window and disappears, hardly catching your attention before it goes out of your sight. There ...

The Cuban author shares his journey as a dissident. This story is published in collaboration with our news partner Pittsburgh Latino Magazine. Jorge Olivera Castillo is a Cuban poet, writer, television editor, journalist, and songwriter. In Cuba, he became a known dissident and fervent advocate for freedom of expression — ...

About the Series: These poems are a part of our ongoing series exploring isolation, exile, and “The Everyday Pandemic.” With the arrival of COVID-19 new realities emerged. Isolation became ubiquitous. Everyday movement suddenly came with great risk. The spaces that once brought order and safety became malleable and uncertain. Throughout ...

In the museum, our child opened her mouth and let out whatever lived there; her sound galloped forward, greeted its echo in the air. Once bound in a house of her needs, she now wished to approach the limits of things: cathedral ceiling; not just rain, but monsoon. She peered ...