The Adroit Journal News Updates

Daniel Tam-Claiborne is familiar with the spaces in between. As a multiracial Chinese American teaching English in rural China, he brought an outsider’s attunement to the people and places he encountered, paying special attention to the power dynamics between expats and locals, teachers and students, men and women. His desire… Read more »

The day I started writing this essay, hundreds of U.S. Marines arrived in downtown Los Angeles, about ten miles from my home in Pasadena. They joined the 2,000 National Guardsmen already in the city. Both the Marines and the National Guard had been tasked with protecting federal property and personnel.… Read more »

Ocean Vuong’s latest novel, The Emperor of Gladness, is a bold and remarkable novel that captures the hopes and disillusionments of people living in today’s America. The story begins in the fictional town of East Gladness, Connecticut, with the unlikely encounter between the young Vietnamese-American man, Hai, who is planning… Read more »

When I decided to pursue an MFA in poetry, I applied widely and foolishly, and somehow accepted an offer from NYU—an offer I quickly questioned in my first workshop where, when introducing ourselves, I learned I was sitting next to a 23-year-old phenom already published in The New Yorker. Fuck,… Read more »

Before I ever stepped to a mic or submitted a poem to a press, music filled my ears, my head, my neighborhood, the kitchen in our household, the whining cassette player beneath my bed sheets. When I discovered poetry, I discovered it through music. My mother had a stack of… Read more »