The story of Than What, a Burmese citizen escaping military persecution, is the beginning of a series covering the narratives of free expression in Burma.
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For the Iraqi translator and poet Soheil Najm, poetry offers an opportunity to start a conversation across cultural barriers. Najm is the co-editor of Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq, an anthology of Iraqi poets in translation. He has also translated selections of work by Nikos Kazantzakis, Alasdair Gray, Ted Hughes, and Jose Saramago. Soheil Najm presents Ra’ad Zamil’s poem, offering a glimpse into the struggles of a generation of Iraqis who have survived Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and are trying to make a life in Iraqi’s nascent democracy.
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As an estimated 60,000 barrels of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico in one day of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill—the Library of Congress named W.S. Merwin the next Poet Laureate. Merwin, 82, is a staunch environmentalist who actively works to save the fragile ecosystem in his home state of Hawaii.
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The crowd at Gist Street. Photo by Jonathan Green (Popcity.) The first Friday of each month around 6:30pm, a line begins to form along Gist Street in Pittsburgh’s Uptown neighborhood. If it’s raining, people clutch umbrellas. […]
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Earlier this month, law enforcement officers pulled over a vehicle that ran a stop sign on Pittsburgh’s South Side. One passenger was arrested after he failed to produce immigration papers. According to immigration rights activist Sister Janice Vanderneck, the arresting officer scoffed, “Welcome to Arizona.”
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Congo/Women, a Pittsburgh-based Space Gallery exhibit of photographs documenting the effects of gender-based violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, asks viewers “too look and to learn and then to act,” according to a statement from the exhibit’s website.
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Here on Sampsonia Way, City of Asylum writer-in-residence Khet Mar and her family marked the 65th birthday of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi by drawing and painting portraits of her. Aung San Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest due to her political involvement in the National League for Democracy in Burma. Following the publication of this post, she was release from house arrest in November 2010.
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