Words Without Borders Campus

In the magazine: Amina Saïd's Border-Defying Poetry

Posted on December 10, 2017

Amina Saïd's poems take on essential questions about life and fate, vision and blindness, death and memory. Marilyn Hecker's lucid translation will help students connect with these universal elements, as well as with the vivid sensory details, in Saïd's series “Clairvoyant in the City of the Blind.” The series appears in the December 2017 issue of the magazine Words without Borders, featuring women authors from Tunisia.

"A lot more connected, a lot less hopeless": Innovative class helps deportees in Mexico

Posted on November 28, 2017

Students and friends in Mexico City. (Photo by Ernesto Méndez.)

"I always knew that I was Mexican. What I didn't know is that I wasn't legal." Pablo*, one of the speakers on a panel discussion of exile in Mexico City last March, spoke for many other young people who live with the fear of deportation—or, as in his case, have already experienced it. Pablo arrived in the U.S. as a toddler, and was deported when he was in his twenties.

The Fight for Civil Rights, Continued: "I Am Not Your Cholo"

Posted on November 15, 2017

According to his biography, Peruvian author Marco Avilés is currently working on a memoir about being "a Latino immigrant in a not very nice time for Latino immigrants." The same witty understatement and sense of perspective is evident in his essay "I Am Not Your Cholo" (translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes), published as part of Words Without Borders' issue of literature in translation, written by authors living in the United States.

In the Magazine: Love and Friendship in Turkey

Posted on October 20, 2017

A chimpanzee sits on a rock formation in an enclosure. — By Vyacheslav Argenberg / http://www.vascoplanet.com/, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

"Cutting last period was my idea." So begins Yalçin Tosun's short story, "Muzaffer and Bananas," which was translated from Turkish by the former associate editor of WWB Campus, Abby Comstock-Gay, and appears in this month's issue of the magazine Words Without Borders.

"Flipping" World Literature: Four Texts to Try

Posted on October 09, 2017

Like many other educational terms, "flipped instruction" if often tossed (or flipped) around, but rarely discussed in depth. Even more rarely is it considered for use in the English and literature classroom. Yet, any student who's ever drowsed through an hour-long lecture, or educator who's searched for ways to help students understand complex texts, will intuitively grasp the benefits of using class time for challenging, collaborative work.