New Tibetan Photographers: Beyond Shangri-la (Tricycle)
“Foreign photographers have shaped the Western images of Tibet. Now Tibetans are taking control of the camera.” A talk with Oxford Professor Clare Harris about her work on photography and Tibet.
My Father, Montaigne, and the Art of Living (Catapult)
A Notable in Best American Essays 2021, and featured in Memoir Monday. I explore what I learned from my father, and Montaigne, about how to live well. “As a philosopher and a physician, my father wasn’t afraid of dying; if anything, he feared coming to the end of his life not having lived.”
How a Tibetan Turquoise Pendant Keeps Me Close to Home (Catapult)
In giving me her pendant, was my mother not only wishing me well on my journey but handing over our family’s story?
In the Cave (Kyoto Journal)
An essay about the connection between the Tibetan idea of bardo (the interval between death and rebirth, as well as any period when our ordinary reality is suspended), COVID-19, and the Japanese concept of ma: empty space with creative potential. "The epidemic interval we're experiencing is an in-between like ma, like bardo...space charged with possibility."
Porochista Khakpour: “I’ve Become Uninterested in Darkness” (Guernica)
Porochista Khakpour’s Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity tells a deeply moving—and often startling—story of being brown-skinned in America.