The conversations, stories, and works of literature and scholarship that inspired our most recent special issue “Camp.”

The dreams only start after camp, after I take my first swim with Appah. I watch him with binoculars as he moves farther and farther out into the deep.

The campus was haunted and we all knew it. That summer we flinched around every corner, put our hands out in front of us when we turned off the lights.

This is my small sphere. / I’ll make good, stay folded in myself. I promise / to memorize the bramble and texture of garden walls.

Borders and exclusion are the flip side of identity. They are all components of the question: “Who belongs?”

Mama runs inside to bang on the bathroom door and yell Chinese vocabulary words at me—yellow light, borrowed light, get in the car, open. I dip my head underwater so every word sounds like a vowel, oceanic and slow.

A collection of essays, poems, and stories by Asian American writers that trouble, expand, and redefine the space of the camp

Fingers caked with wet / rice break backs and bellies, / pluck gills, / scrape eggs, tear limbs / Tita takes our legs– / cracks them / under a glass jar for us. / We suck shells ’til twilight.

A personal history of race and the American outdoors, from Chicago’s Red Summer to Japanese American incarceration

We’re now accepting submissions to a new special issue of The Margins.