Kaya Oakes teaches writing at UC Berkeley. She is the author of five books, including The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Life's In-Betweens to Remake the World.
By the time people were finally ready to listen to Sinéad O'Connor's message, the world's cruelty had run her down. Kaya Oakes calls for listening to other wounded women who are demanding justice in our broken world.
Book review: In Patricia Lockwood's No One Is Talking About This, if you're willing to immerse yourself in the scroll of her narrative, you'll find plenty of humor and empathy in her first novel.
It’s important to understand that the Mary we meet on Mother’s Day in 2020 is not the same Palestinian Jewish girl who gave birth to Jesus 2,000 years ago. Nor is Mary a sentimentally perfect woman, meek, mild and passive, a religious Hallmark card who has come to represent the idealized mother figure most of our own mothers would struggle to measure up to.
Book Review: Lakeland's book returns toward its end to the idea of the Catholic imagination, which is ultimately a sacramental one. Fiction can offer a world infused by grace in a manner that nonfiction and poetry might struggle to get across.