In 2020, George Floyd's sadistic public murder ripped away the grand illusion of universal empathy at the core of the American Promise and vividly demonstrated ...
With over 300 entries this year and a pool that seems to get stronger all the time, it was a tough job to pick just one winner in each category. We have been ex...
I am twelve years old and, between fifth grade and seventh grade, I have gone from flat-chested to a Double D cup. Some girls envy me, and gossip, but they don’...
But I don’t say that, instead I will say that I’m going to build a Tiny House, and ditch the double-wide. That way they will be awed instead by my quirky ingenu...
She was frequently absent from my class, sat in the back with another African American student, and never participated. I wrote notes on her papers to come to ...
In the black-and-white photo I hold, Dad delivers his salutatorian speech to a small crowd. Dated May 1959, the picture is unremarkable except for Dad’s skeleta...
Melissa was killed six years ago. A couple of years after, I learned a TV show was to feature her story. I felt compelled to watch it. The show opened with the ...
My voice climbed an invisible staircase until at the top step of my skull it jumped up and down and waved its arms in the air. “Wake up, mom! Wake up!” I said. ...
Considering most Latter-Day Saint missionaries build their faith on a manifestation of God and Jesus to a 14-year old boy in upstate New York, many young Mormon...
As I watched this soft-spoken, self-effacing elderly man repeatedly humiliated by his wife, all the venomous rancor I had held for years completely dissipated. ...
On the way home, he took me here, to this place under the Tappan Zee Bridge, on the shore of the Hudson, on the front lawn of an apartment complex where neither...
I am lazy, fat, asinine, stupid. I still feel his red hot anger, the spit on my face, and the insults flying toward me. The feelings and labels remain, despite ...
*Featured Image by Rollin Jewett A few days after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I received a call from an organization ...
This is how the Holocaust ended for me, a solitary Polish-Jew liberated by American soldiers from the infamous death camp Mauthausen. I was at the time an emaci...
Formally coming out at 19 in the mid-’80s was a catastrophe ruled by fear. Fear, fear, fear. Fear of HIV and AIDS. It was a panic that molded my life and ruled ...
