Contributed by Firoozeh Dumas, author of Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America. 2023 marks the 20-year anniversary of the groundbreaking memoir, which has remained a classroom favorite for two decades.  When I was in high school, a major news outlet took a poll to find out the most unpopular country

Contributed by Michelle Kuo, author of Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship Every teacher has likely experienced two emotions: the feeling that you’ve gotten through to a student and the feeling that you’ve let him down. In the first, the classroom is a powerful place of human connection, and the

Dear Readers, Are you stuck at home, right now? Me, too. I can hear the laundry spinning in the dryer and smell overripe bananas piled on the kitchen counter. I’m spending a lot of time looking out the window, too, because I’d really like to go outside and talk to people. But I’m not supposed

Charles Lindbergh: Comparing the Past to the Present It began with the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.  That was the story I originally intended to tell.  But as I began corralling my research, the dominant personality that was Charles Lindbergh soon overshadowed everything and everyone else.  He was so complicated, so contradictory, so compelling.  To me, he

Dear Reader, This story is fiction. But it also tells the truth. All stories start with a seed and for me that seed was planted years ago when I first crossed paths with Lord Byron’s epic poem, The Giaour, along with his deeply ingrained Orientalism and sexism. In college, I took a class that centered around