Thrity Umrigar

"Writing was my way to make sense of the world outside and inside my home. Despite the recollections of the adults in my life, I don't think I was a terribly articulate child. Writing was a way to give…"

"I think I was politicized at age five, once I started noticing the beggars on the streets, and children my age who had to rummage through dumpsters looking for food. But since I grew up in a middle-cl…"

"We often hear all this rhetoric of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” discipline and punishment, and I just don’t believe in that. In all my years I haven’t come across an adult who, because they go…"

"I always share this advice with my writing students: Tell the story of one person so deeply and completely, that in the act of going deep into that one person, something magical happens, and it become…"