Issue 19 / 2002

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19 / Diversity Dialogues

Unheard voices, untold stories

In this issue, celebrated authors like John Edgar Wideman, Francine Prose, Andrei Codrescu, Terry Tempest Williams, and Richard Rodriguez write essays about diversity that defy easy labels.

The collection includes an essay by Floyd Skloot, who, having suffered from a virus that attacked and damaged his brain 12 years ago, ponders his disabled status.

In “The Green Room,” Eliot Sloan works to assimilate the impact of her father’s gay identity on both their lives. Chavawn Kelley, a white Easterner thrust into the incongruous setting of a Native American classroom, attempts to teach from an outdated lesson plan that uses passages about silverware etiquette to teach writing in “Red, White, and Silver.” In “Confessions of a Black Buddhist Nun,” Faith Adiele, the biracial child of a single white mother, turns her back on a carefully constructed, “politically correct” American upbringing to become a Buddhist nun in Thailand and finds her Buddhism leading to reconciliation with her past.

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