All posts tagged: 2026

Excerpt from The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life

Excerpt from The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life

February 19, 2026

By HELEN WHYBROW

Book cover of The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow

 

This piece is excerpted from the memoir The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life by Helen Whybrow, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.

A bird is not born knowing how to fly. Not exactly. Leaping off a rafter and opening two perfectly constructed aerodynamic wings will get a fledgling only so far—usually to another rafter, or a spot on the ground, or sometimes to a confusing corner of a window where an invisible cobweb will wrap its sticky strands around a beating wing and mangle the delicate microzippered fibers ever so slightly so that the wing no longer beats at all.

Excerpt from The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life
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Excerpt from A Return To Self

Excerpt from A Return To Self

February 19, 2026

By AATISH TASEER

Book cover for A Return to Self

This piece is excerpted from the memoir A Return To Self by Aatish Taseer, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of for LitFest 2026 events here.                                                                                              

At 9:05 a.m. on the tenth of November, 2020, a hush fell over the leaden turbulence of the Bosporus. All activity on the strait ceased. Coast Guard ships, ferries, and caïques, like the younger members of a tribe of large marine mammals, drew close in a circle. Behind them, a Turkish destroyer kept vigil, the blue of its gunmetal merging with the strait’s frigid waters. A red-bottomed freighter marked with the words iraqi line hulked in the background. That cityscape of sea-blackened buildings, broad panes glazed silver in the daytime darkness, was no ordinary Left Bank, no mere farther shore. The silhouette of low domes and pencil-thin minarets piercing a nimbus of pale sky above was the continent of Asia. The wonder of looking at it, with my feet still planted on the shores of Europe, was not lost on me. I had been in Istanbul for less than seventy-two hours. The air grew heavy with anticipation, and then, low and deep and melancholy as whale song, came the first moan of a ship’s horn.

Excerpt from A Return To Self
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I/Teh Ran

I/Teh Ran

February 18, 2026

By SARVIN PARVIZ

woman holding a sheet in front of the mountains

Photo courtesy of the author.

Tehran, Diaspora

I moved to the U.S. for a creative writing program with a luggage full of must-haves and gifts, to survive the at-once costs with one paycheck, memorabilia from each friend and close relatives to hold, on days of unbelonging and loss, to feel the connection to the ground back to a place. The largest collection of belongings is in my phone. More than twenty thousand photos of food on the table (always more than one plate), streets of Tehran at night through the car window, wet and bright after rain, harmonious, unlike the dust and chaos of the day. My daisy covered shoes on the curb, friends singing, tapping on the table, hugging, running all the way to the top of a hill. When I moved, the photos became similar, screen shots of Facetime or Zoom calls, us in squares next to each other, our joy breaking out of the frame, heart emojis flying, everyone laughing.

I/Teh Ran
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From Teaching Herself How To Survive to Teaching Us All: Rosa Castellano Interviews Diamond Forde

From Teaching Herself How To Survive to Teaching Us All: Rosa Castellano Interviews Diamond Forde

February 9, 2026

Rosa Castellano (left) and Diamond Forde (right)

DIAMOND FORDE’s newest poetry collection, The Book of Alice, was the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award and was recently published by Scribner Books. Her first poetry collection, Mother Body, was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nominee. 

For this interview, Forde connected with friend and fellow poet, ROSA CASTELLANO, over Zoom. Castellano sipped coffee in Richmond, Virginia, while Forde sat in her bright office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her dog, Oatmeal, curled at her feet. The poets discussed navigating family memories, the Bible, and Scribner selecting Forde’s manuscript during their open call for poetry manuscripts in 2023.

From Teaching Herself How To Survive to Teaching Us All: Rosa Castellano Interviews Diamond Forde
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Map

Map

February 5, 2026 ,

By MARIN SORESCU

Translated by DANIEL CARDEN NEMO

 

Translator’s note

Marin Sorescu, despite being one of the most translated Romanian writers, is one of the literary world’s best kept secrets. The reason for it, to my mind, lies squarely in the quality of existing English translations, as many of them have failed to capture his poetic essence. Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he never received the award based on his translated work.

Like many of his poems, “Map” reveals Sorescu’s depth of thought and highly associative mind, and above all his ability to convey the most complex emotions and contemplations into a multi-layered poetry that remains accessible to all. The challenge in the translation here comes from the ability to convey an intimate, almost didactic exploration of the body, revealing the speaker’s vulnerability as he opens himself up for in(tro)spection. The body becomes a cartographic landscape, with known and uncharted areas, while the self is a terrain molded by time, animated by the soul, and inevitably oriented toward death. The poem blends stark physicality with cosmic metaphysics, suggesting that human identity, just like the Earth’s geography, contains vastness, complexity, and the unknowable. It is consciousness which imbues the world with dynamism. Without internal life, and perhaps without poetry, existence becomes static, ornamental.

Map
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