Writings and Books

This section's articles

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  To Change the World: My Years in Cuba

  Excerpt from Prologue
  Fidel Castro came to New York City in the summer of 1960, fresh from his guerrilla triumph. I was a young writer and soon-to-be single mother, enormously pregnant with Gregory—my son who, forty-six years later, would suggest we write about Cuba together—but I longed to see the hero up close, applaud his stance, express my personal appreciation. Carefully, lovingly, I prepared a platter of Spanish paella; not such a tropical staple perhaps, but my signature dish at the (...)
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  Stones Witness

  Memory of Samothrace
  1.
  The little girl, wearing a navy blue coat with white Peter Pan collar, holds her grandfather’s hand as they pass through the main entrance to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once inside the building, she will be allowed to disengage and move off towards the many attractions that ignite her passion. As long as she remains in view, he says. The little girl is six or seven; she is me six decades ago. The grandfather, who has been dead now more than forty years, (...)
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  Into Another Time: Grand Canyon Reflections

  The Lens Frames this Image
  The lens frames this image then lets it go as I slowly sweep walls that move in the opposite direction faster than my camera can do its work.
  Panning space but also time: centuries of buildup, millennia of sedimentation, uplift, intrusion, deposit, erosion, faulting and the shudder of tectonic plates.
  I want to hold the shadow of an instant gone two hundred million years ago, its movement playing across my line of vision.
  I would register this shift of earth, (...)
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  Dentro de otro tiempo: reflejos del Gran Canon

  LO QUE OIGO
  Basketmaker, Anasazi, Cohonina, Sinagua y Paiute, voces que susurran a través de los deltas, pálidas sílabas, torcidas y estiradas con el peso del maíz y los frijoles, cargados por caminos escarpados hasta los graneros que se llenan por otro invierno y otro. Hasta que no hay más inviernos y la gente también se ha ido, dejándonos con preguntas torpes y corazón estremecido.
  Nos colocamos en estos sonidos antiguos: sombras profundas trepando de color a color, el clima galopando y el (...)
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  Narrative of Power: Essays for an Endangered Century

  Let America be America Again, Round 2
  Let America be America again . . . —Langston Hughes
  But was it ever? Perhaps for those who roamed with buffalo and spirit song before Vespucci came bearing a name so foreign to their lives. Perhaps for the families pushing their wagons west planting crude crosses as they rutted heartland and rivers, the challenge of mountains. Conquest (...)
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  When I Look Into the Mirror and See You: Women, Terror and Resistance

  Chapter 1 The Prism: Women’s Human Rights
  Language evokes, describes, communicates. But language can also be used to obscure and mislead. It can be used to kill. Today’s political discourse, cynically manipulated, often does just that. Nowhere is this more evident than when speaking of violence. How do we define violence, who do we see as perpetrating it, which acts of violence do we condemn and which do we justify?
  We call the Islamic fundamentalists who attacked the United States on (...)
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  Where They Left You for Dead / Halfway Home

  Androgynous and very beautiful,
  they list your qualities among those others: patron saint of healers and of fish, master (and mistress?) of rivers. Doctor, hunter, fisherman, fisher woman or both, god or goddess of the gatherers, one who lives in water and on land.
  We prepare your meal: red snapper with watercress, squash, sweet potato, Mandarin oranges, sweet wine and almond oil. We dress for dinner in your blues, yellows, whites. Adorn ourselves with shells and beads that (...)
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  Esto sucede cuando el corazon de una mujer se rompe

  ESTO SUCEDE CUANDO EL CORAZON DE UNA MUJER SE ROMPE
  Después de la pérdida de Granada estabas indignada, abatida de pesar. Tanto Goliat para tan vulnerable David. En Trinidad, el recuerdo de tu paisaje te abrió a las mujeres, a ti misma. Cuando hablas nos abarcas con tus dedos finos, color de café pálido bajo la luz distante del atril, luego sonríes y nos previenes contra la metáfora del cuerpo femenino como playa o palmera.
  Jícama cruda. Luciérnaga. Yo conozco esta historia, no olvido mi propia (...)
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  The Price You Pay: The Hidden Cost of Women’s Relationship to Money

  The Egg Route (fragment)
  " . . . the entity called the family—that battleground, open wound, haven and theater of the absurd, which dominates each human childhood." —Adrienne Rich
  "Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being." —Audre Lorde
  "Oh he was (...)
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  Hunger’s Table: Women, Food & Politics

  Grape Pie
  1
  This pie calls for 4 cups blue grapes and asks that skillful fingers slip the pulp from their skins. It requires you cook the lush mass until its seeds loosen, and begs you keep your fantasies in check.
  Press cooked pulp through a colander to remove but save the seeds. Your breathing stumbles now, mouth dries, thighs tingle and body moves gently back and forth.
  Now combine the pulp, seeds, 3/4 cup sugar 1-1/2 tablespoons lemon juice, 1 tablespoon grated orange rind and (...)

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