Jennifer Johnson: A Haunting Novel of Childhood Trauma
The novel takes a hard look at how children who endure growing up in dysfunctional families, suffer dire consequences and are left to a lifetime of personal struggles.
Janette Schafer: On the day I testify for Homeland Security
Janette agreed to share these details publicly to help allay the stigma, shame, and secrecy inherent with being a sex abuse survivor.
Video: Spoon
In this visual poem, Markus Kempken explores specific objects — spoons, spatulas, flutes — and the way they trigger memories of his childhood abuse.
Arlene Weiner: Nobody’s coming to save the children
Catherine Doty’s pitiless poems beautifully show us what we don’t want to see: children’s poverty, abuse, neglect. And their meanness. Poor children living in squalor, which Doty’s language often veils in lyrical glamor.
Sydney Lea: Gradus ad Parnassum
On the other hand, the open handed
blows left scarce a mark, applied to your head or neck
Judith Alexander Brice: My Papa’s Music
We weren’t a talking family
especially when it came
to discussing why I locked myself
in the bathroom upstairs
Video: Buskers
Buskers is the story of Packo, a young Dubliner, and Milos, a Romanian immigrant, who battle to secure a space to beg at a Dublin train station. After a comical … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Foundling
You stood, small and mute,
on the stoop where she’d left you
with a tiny, plastic suitcase,
like a bad joke, beside you.
Alyssa Sineni: Sharp Edges
This was our childhood.
We were all left
to scavenge the woods
George Monbiot: The Unlearning
Boarding school, a peculiarly British form of abuse, has devastating impacts not only on the boarders, but on those they grow up to dominate.
Elizabeth Kirschner: Jones Beach
He went out. Into the ocean’s black maw. To save. To rescue. Didn’t, as they say, come back. Death is funny like that, precise, dissolute.
Karen J. Greenberg: No Fairy Tale
The Trump administration has taken a giant step in trying to abolish the very idea of human rights as a part of the country’s identity.
Ginger Thompson: A Border Patrol Agent Reveals What It’s Really Like to Guard Migrant Children
With the agency under fire for holding children in deplorable conditions and over racist and misogynistic Facebook posts, one agent speaks about what it’s like to do his job. “Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal.”
Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan: Abolish Migrant Child Jails Now
Debating the fate of jailed migrant children is important, but the life-and-death crisis that they have been thrown into demands immediate action.
