Last week, award-winning author and MIT professor, Junot Díaz was confronted by author Zinzi Clemmons, who stated he backed her into a corner and forcibly kissed her while she was a graduate student in his workshop in 2012. What quickly followed was a slew of accusations and allegations from various authors; accusing Díaz of sexual misconduct, assault, harassment, bullying, and violent misogyny. As a grad student, I invited Junot Diaz to speak to a workshop on issues of representation in literature. I was an unknown wide-eyed 26 yo, and he used it as an opportunity to corner and forcibly kiss …
Teachers need our appreciation now more than ever. All across the globe teachers today are struggling with painfully low budgets, making it nearly impossible to supply their classrooms with the materials they need, give their students the attention they deserve, and create a safe and steady learning environment. Last Friday, teachers in Arizona returned to work after a six-day strike protesting the state’s budget cuts. The strike ended because legislative lawmakers agreed to give the teachers a 20% pay raise, along with a budget increase. The only catch, however, is that the new budget will be coming from a tax raise for …
In 2016, John’s Hopkins University Press received a $938,000 grant courtesy of The Andrew Mellon Foundation, which allowed them the funds to continue building an Open Access (OA) platform for monographs in humanities and social sciences. This was all part of MUSE Open, a non-profit organization aimed at making scholarly texts, journals, articles, and more readily accessible. The organization was founded in 1995 and, in the past twenty-three years, has teamed up with nearly 300 publishers to make works from all categories available online. via Project MUSE This is vital because people who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to read and learn from …
An opinion piece was released in The New York Times on Sunday entitled Save Barnes & Noble! which detailed the financial distress the bookstore chain is currently in and how, if we don’t speak out now, the entire company could go under and we could lose Barnes & Noble for good. This prompted a slew of response pieces, along with the Twitter trend Save Barnes & Noble. Many Twitter users were quick to protect the bookstore chain, leaping to it’s defense: Make no mistake: the loss of over 600 more bookstores would be a cataclysmic blow to literacy and reading and empathy in America. We …
Have you heard of the insanely cool French craze of short story dispensers? If not, don’t stress, because they’re finally coming to the United States and I, personally, am so excited! These machines, which were created by the company Short Edition, print out original short stories and poems that vary from one-, three-, or five- minute reads. They are adjustable so you can choose just how long you’d like your short story to be. The first machine was put up in France in 2015. Shortly after, famed director Frances Ford Coppola ordered his very own for his cafe in San Fransisco. …
