Ming Holden

I teach an extract of John Berger's 1972 "Ways of Seeing" to undergraduate composition students. Berger's claim that "men act and women appear," a seemingly antiquated notion, is always fodder for lively debate, along with his suggestion that women fashion their social presence such that others treat them...

I took one introductory international relations class my freshman year of college. It was painfully dry; I spent lectures slouching in back, admiring my combat boots and writing bad poetry. After that one foray into the formal study of international relations, fully half of the rest of my literary arts...

When I visit my childhood home in California, I often postulate to my schoolteacher mother while standing in the bathroom doorway as she brushes her teeth. (I talk a lot; it's one of the only times I can corner her into listening.)

About five years back, my big idea...

"Neither peace nor war happen by accident."

Madeleine Albright said it at her lecture here in Bloomington, Indiana a few months ago. It was a succinct and eloquent nod to the power of intentionality, and she uttered it at the outset of election-campaign season in American politics, a...

The first issue of the comic ElfQuest, written in 1978, depicts a kidnapped elf called Redlance. Elves can "send" thoughts telepathically to other elves within "sending range." The captured Redlance is saved because his loved ones "send" to one another, collaborating to ambush and free him -- without...

"Maybe it's an émigré thing," Russian-born Mikhail Iossel laughs on the phone from his office at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is a professor. "Once uprooted, you just keep rolling."

It was in Boston's Copley Hotel, shortly after his arrival in the U.S., that Iossel realized how deep his...

Last September I was in Turkey for the second-ever Writers and Literary Translators International Congress. Keynote Speaker Maureen Freely, who translates Orhan Pamuk's books, said during her address that translating is much the same as writing novels, which she also writes, and articles, which she writes as well. "You have...

This summer I mobilized the Survival Girls, a theater group for refugee girls from Congo in a Nairobi slum, and witnessed the profound power of healing a space designated "girls only" gave to them. Thing is, as a writer, I obsess probably too much about words. And I -- the...

My first day at Nairobi's UNHCR compound this summer, I was working at a computer when a woman's scream tore into the air. I froze; I had come to work with refugee girls through the UNHCR, but I wasn't an official employee. I looked out the window. Where were the...

The last time I wrote on the Huffington Post about Kenya I was starting a youth empowerment effort, the nature of which was rather vague. I did know that I was in Nairobi with the operational support of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and that of the

Jon Stewart came to Indiana for my birthday. Well, okay, on my birthday. When I was a college freshman in 2002, we used to gather in the basement of our dorm, next to the laundry machines, on smelly, ramshackle couches to watch The Daily Show. Those were the halcyon...

I arrived in Africa in the middle of the night a couple of days ago, but I don't know exactly why. I do know that I am affiliated with The Great Globe Foundation, a theater arts organization that brings workshops to youth in the world's largest refugee camp,...

Hollywood

As the proud daughter of a film editor, I don't aim to poo-poo even the more flagrant self-congratulatory nature of awards season. It's Hollywood, it's the Oscars, and Kirk Douglas might not get another chance up there in this lifetime, so he'll take his sweet...

When I was a 24-year-old mess of the privileged, educated, and underemployed variety, I lived for five months in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, working as an event bookseller all over New York, meeting middle-aged authors and drinking too much with them. When one of them said, "Well, shall we go to...

In order to explain the importance of literary work to the broader project of social justice, international exchange, and democracy, I might need to start in Turkey.

I was one of very few Americans to attend the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress (WALTIC) in Istanbul from September...

What follows is the second of what will likely end up a series of reflections on participating in an MFA program and instructing in the field of creative writing within a university. The HuffPost audience is likely to have more than a few things to add to the conversation around...

What follows is the first of what will likely end up a series of reflections on participating in an MFA program and instructing in the field of creative writing within a university. The Huffpo audience is likely to have more than a few things to add to the conversation around...

So I ostensibly live in Indiana at the moment, but this funny thing happened earlier this month where I was in Istanbul with a bunch of literary translators.

The Writers and Literary Translators International Congress (WALTIC) began as a brainchild of the Swedish Writers Union and inaugurated in...

If you're at a writing conference at the Richard Hugo House, Seattle's literary hub, and a cheerful, chestnut-curled woman strides into the overfilled workshop room and announces, "We're going to O-Rama!" (meaning, "we're going to switch rooms!") you've probably found Alix Wilber.

And if you see an unsure...

The Pundit

One recent evening, Jon Stewart pulled his George W. Bush imitation on The Daily Show after a "highlights" clip of the then-President speaking. Stewart hunches up when he imitates Bush and speaks in a nasal voice, spitting out cowboy catch words. That evening...