All News

In Lviv this summer, my son and I had some of the most spectacular meals of our lives. Salads arrived garnished with fresh flowers. Pastries floated by us adorned with fragrant wild berries gathered by hand or a special wooden comb in forests unblemished by mines. We were offered mint drinks, locally sourced rose petal ice cream, and lemonade with crushed sea buckhorn. This same summer, people just like us in cities just like ours were blown to pieces by rockets, drones, bombs.  

Join Generation Women DC for a special fundraising evening in support of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center. This November, we explore how stories connect us across cultures and continents. Each of our multigenerational speakers will share a personal tale of how travel, literature, or global voices have shaped their lives, perspectives, and imaginations.

As the tires of the airplane hit the runway of Narita airport, I closed my eyes and gripped the armchair. The whole flight, I was preparing myself for this, the jolting moment the plane meets the ground, an abrupt signal that you have finally made it to where you are going. I am no stranger to solo traveling, on admittedly more minor scales, leaving home for college twice. But I was always traveling to get away from one thing or another, a memory or feeling. And I guess in a similar way, I found myself traveling overseas for the first time just to look for one thing or the other, alone, and only after landing does the fact that I may not know the language as much as I told myself start to sink in.

Spanish author Marta Sanz engages audiences in the DMV through readings, panels, and workshops during her 2025 Cheuse Center residency. Spanish writer and literary critic Marta Sanz will participate in a series of literary events in the DMV area during her 2025 residency at the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University, in collaboration with the Cultural Office of the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C. Sanz will be in the U.S. from September 26 to October 3, beginning in Washington, DC, before continuing to New York City.

"When Eloise tells Kofi she wants a divorce, he sits naked on the kitchen floor skinning an ox tongue to prepare Eloise’s favorite dish." So begins Brian Gyamfi's poem, 'The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi'.

The barn could be neither more plain nor less imposing.        Little cared for, seeming underappreciated. Unpainted wood. Board-and-batten sides, roof of tin. Long and narrow, yet, in the whole length of it, only six windows, arranged in two blocks of three each, high up on one wall. Not much light gets in except through the holes and cracks in the walls.        There probably was not much light to come through those windows anyway in the middle of the night or even in the early morning that time in 1955 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and murdered in that barn near Drew, Mississippi. But it had to be tough for a lone Black youth facing a squad of White men, in the dark, those men seeming intent on life-ending torture. 

In another life, my grandmother would have been a hairstylist. My mother told me the story once as she grew up hearing it, and it felt like legend, embedded itself in my consciousness like a bit of grit in an oyster.      I guess I’ve always mythologized my mother and her mother. Their lives as women in Japan in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s seemed to follow a Joseph Campbell-esque hero cycle with one or two major deviations, and over the years in the mantle of my brain their stories grew, nacre covered and shining.        My grandmother grew up on a tea farm in the mountains of Japan’s green tea capital, Shizuoka-ken. She was the second youngest of eight surviving siblings: six sisters, two brothers, and two “water children”, or stillbirths. The oldest brother would of course inherit the tea farm, and each of the sisters left the nest in turn to make their own way in the world. Women in those days didn’t want to be a “burden” on their families my mother says, and she uses the word again when she describes why she left home at eighteen.