How did City of Asylum start in the United States? Desire Cooper tells the story of Richard Wiley, a writer and professor who helped establish the first American City of Asylum, located at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
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In November 2004, a friend asked Pittsburgh dentist Owen Cantor, “Do you want to see a poet read a house?” He had no idea it would change his life. “There on the north side, a Chinese […]
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On a seasonable mid-September afternoon, Corneal Hopson kept the door to his row house open. The long-time resident of Pittsburgh’s Sampsonia Way wanted to keep an eye on his granddaughter Almond, 7, and two great nieces, […]
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When Richard Wiley was in his 20s, he left his home in Tacoma, Washington to join the Peace Corps. “I didn’t want to get drafted to serve in Vietnam,” said Wiley. “When the Peace Corps asked […]
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Horacio Castellanos Moya can be described as mischievous, witty, impatient, and brilliant. But it’s the omnipresence of violence that characterizes his fiction. In an essay for Sampsonia Way, “Notes on the Culture of Violence and Fiction […]
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For most high school students, taking a literature class is hardly a life-changing event. Not so for Italo Vasquez-Velasquez. Born in El Salvador, he attended a private high school in the mid-1980s. His teacher assigned books […]
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In 2004 businessman Henry Reese established COA/P as a refuge for creative writers suffering from persecution in their homelands. Six years later, COA/P is a series of row houses fronting on a narrow alley called Sampsonia […]
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