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Apr 23, 2024 | 
bloomsite.wordpress.com | Alice Marguerite Stephens
C.J. Spataro is an award-winning short fiction writer whose work has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies, including Taboos & Transgressions, Iron Horse Literary Review, december, Sequestrum, and Exacting Clam. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Publishing programs at Rosemont College and was a founding partner of Philadelphia Stories. Her debut novel, More Strange Than True, will be published by Sagging Meniscus Press in June, 2024.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
lmtonline.com | Jean Kwok |Alice Marguerite Stephens
By Jean Kwok William Morrow. 288 pp. $30 - - - When China's government introduced the one-child policy in 1980 with the stated goal of curbing the population to increase national prosperity, it had many unintended consequences - sex-selection abortion, infanticide and forced sterilization. It also triggered a rise in overseas adoption, as parents in China's highly patriarchal society gave away daughters in the hope that their next child would be a boy.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
washingtonpost.com | Alice Marguerite Stephens
CommentSaveWhen China’s government introduced the one-child policy in 1980 with the stated goal of curbing the population to increase national prosperity, it had many unintended consequences — sex-selection abortion, infanticide and forced sterilization. It also triggered a rise in overseas adoption, as parents in China’s highly patriarchal society gave away daughters in the hope that their next child would be a boy.
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Sep 19, 2023 | 
tinyurl.com | Alice Marguerite Stephens
By Ann LevinThe first baby book came in the mail when my mother, Sally, started her death cleaning about thirty years before she died. She had a mania for order—she did the dishes while she cooked rather than letting them pile up in the sink—so it made sense that she began the project when she still had decades left to live. About the size of a scrapbook, it arrived in a padded envelope with a rose-tinted beige cover and gold-embossed title, Our Baby’s First Seven Years.
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Sep 1, 2023 | 
gaytimes.co.uk | Alice Marguerite Stephens |Sam Damshenas |Zoya Raza-Sheikh |Josh Osman
Originals After attending Middlesex Pride, Just Like Us ambassador Rayyan Aboobaker writes about the power of representation.
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Jun 5, 2023 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Alice Marguerite Stephens
In 2020, two months after the murder of George Floyd, I attended an online panel of four distinguished book critics, during which it was suggested that in order to be published in mainstream publications, a reviewer needed to act like a white man. I was shocked, not because they actually said the quiet part out loud, but because none of them — three were white — seemed to think there was anything wrong with this.
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Apr 20, 2023 | 
varsity.co.uk | Alice Marguerite Stephens
In Michaelmas, a Varsity article about the activities of Downing’s all-male drinking society got picked up by The Times. Following on from similar exposés in the past, the coverage centred around the treatment of women by these groups. In this instance, a porter at Downing had discovered letters in the pidges of female freshers ‘deemed attractive’ by the male members, inviting them to a swap with the theme ‘Anything But Clothes’.
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Mar 22, 2023 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Alice Marguerite Stephens
Often, a society’s most virulent prejudice is saved for those of its own whose blood is mixed with the DNA of outsiders, polluting the supposed purity of the majority race. As a mixed-race Korean adoptee, I and others like me were ethnically cleansed from our country by the South Korean government through a robust intercountry adoption program. In a homogeneous society, the taint of the foreign cannot be hidden.
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Feb 27, 2023 | 
washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Alice Marguerite Stephens
You know how when you’re climbing a peak, and the top is so tantalizingly close, and yet every time you look up, it’s as far away as ever? That’s where I am with my work-in-progress. Yet, even as I labor on, forging ahead word by word, I despair for the publishing prospects of my manuscript. It does things that writers are strongly advised not to do, like telling and not showing. In fact, the narrative is mostly dialogue.
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Feb 20, 2023 | 
varsity.co.uk | Alice Marguerite Stephens
Pre-emptive nostalgia is a peculiar feeling. In my first year, my friends and I used to go for long walks along the backs just to take pictures of King’s as the sun went down. Everything — the bridges, the old high walls, the statues with their muted faces — was intensely present, but the experience was dreamlike. By second year, the wide-eyed wanderings stopped, and Cambridge sank into the background of my life. I still knew the city was beautiful, but familiarity stole its vividness.
