In the fall of 2012, I moved to Kabul, Afghanistan.

…there is no literary character more similar to the President-elect than Napoleon Bonaparte as depicted by Tolstoy in War and Peace.

The first time I heard about the recording of President-elect Donald Trump bragging about his demeaning treatment of women like it was a badge of honor, I no longer wanted my boyfriend of five years to touch me.

The morning after the election, I agonized about how to talk with my first-year students about the outcome.

I was born like anyone else. Mom and Dad loved me like anyone else’s parents loved them. Like anyone else, after school, ran from skinheads.

The night of the second presidential debate, I called my mother. It wasn’t supposed to be a political call;

Omar annoyed me for the normal reasons that students annoy teachers.

In the summer of 2015, I was working in Spain for a theater project with a Spaniard friend of mine.

I grew up in a schism. My father came of age in a Jewish family from Massapequa, New York, and my mother a Baptist family from Dalton, Massachusetts.

On a family ranch, you have to earn your belonging.

I picked the boy out because his picture looked friendly and his profile said that he only had two weeks left in the States.

During my first semester of college, I played what I thought was a “fun icebreaker” — a game I called Guess My Race!

I remember completing the initial draft of my first play, Nothing But The Truth, during the summer of 2013; I was convinced I’d created a masterpiece.

I had finally begun to build a home of my own. Unsettled and confused after college, I moved to Monterey, a coastal town in California, where I was amongst friends and working as a preschool teacher.

Several years ago, while writing a philosophy dissertation about moral saints and drinking ungodly quantities of coffee at night, I came across two real-life stories that ended up having a profound effect on me.