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6 Tales of Magic in Hard Times

Posted on November 24, 2020

Light through fall trees.

Who couldn't use a little magic this fall? Toward that end, we've pulled together six global stories that combine realism and fantasy. Each story features a young person facing real-world problems, and finding support in the form of a slightly magical intervention. Travel with us to the Middle East, East Asia—and an unnamed village somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, sometime in the future.

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Just Published: Liberty, Hope, and Climate Change

Posted on November 08, 2020

Francisco de la Mora, from "Liberty and Hope"

U.S. President-elect Joe Biden has said that one of his first acts will be to re-enter the U.S. into the Paris Climate Accord. To help students understand what this might mean on both a global and an individual level, you might have them read the stories, poems, essays, and graphic literature recently published in the recent Climate issue of the magazine Words Without Borders.

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Teaching Beyond Melancholy, Part 1: The Clichés of Reading in Translation

Posted on October 29, 2020

Christi Merrill teaching about "Translation Networks," University of Michigan, 2015.

This was not the situation I had expected last summer when I first proposed a mini course for graduate students called “Writing for Words Without Borders.” The course was to meet for five three-hour stretches on consecutive Wednesdays, starting March 18, 2020. As it turned out, this meant our first class would be held exactly a week after our university president announced that all of UM would switch to remote teaching for the rest of the winter term. I happened to hear his announcement on the radio as I was driving around Ann Arbor running before-the-sky-falls errands.

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Join Us for #TeaGlobally THIS Thursday the 29th @ 5 pm EDT: Empowering Students in the Covid Era

Posted on October 21, 2020

Attire.
Farazeh Syed, Attire (cropped). 2016. A woman sits on a red sofa, rifle hanging on the wall behind her.

How can we build students' confidence in their own voices and global understandings -- especially in the middle of a pandemic? Words Without Borders invites you to discuss this and other questions at our next live-streaming meet-up: #TeaGlobally, Thursday October 29th at 5 pm Eastern.

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