Abigail Celoria - University of North Carolina Wilmington

I know Dad has told Momma what happened because she is silent as she hands out the brisket. Usually, she asks us how many pieces we want, and what size, but tonight she dishes it out as it comes. Her thin hands hesitate before placing the meat on my plate alongside mounds of mashed potatoes and string beans. I clamp down on the cherry pit in my mouth when she sits back and asks Dad to say grace. He prays so quickly and quietly that I wonder if he doesn’t want God to hear him.

Arlene Rosales-Alvarado - University of Oklahoma

Growing up, I never fully grasped the meaning of safe space. There wasn’t a place that saw me at my worst or best until I was forced to hide in a square smaller than 5 x 5 meters.

Tayler Bakotic - New York University

What does it mean to be Bolivian in America?

It’s difficult to answer that

When I’ve never met another Bolivian in America

Charlotte Egginton - Johns Hopkins University

My mother was a writer, but until the day she died

She kept her life’s work locked away in a beautiful maple wood desk.

My father claims he never knew her secret until she told him, when I was twenty-five,

but I find that hard to believe––

Natalie Martusciello - College of Charleston

My hair smelled like burnt bacon because my housemate had burnt bacon that morning, setting off the fire alarm. Claire’s frying pan sucked. Whenever I would use it to cook an egg, the bottom of the egg would burn and stick to the pan. I absentmindedly traced my jaw with my thumb, digging deep into my double chin. On YouTube, this girl said that she did this repeatedly every day for one month, and her double chin eventually vanished.

McKenna Seiger - University of the Incarnate Word

Sometimes memories of her come to me in dreams so vivid I wake up in cold sweat. Sometimes it is only pieces of her I see like, her favorite OPI nail polish or the photograph of her brother she kept on her nightstand.