![Online Exclusive: "Hands Chopping Air": on teaching ESL in Manhattan's Chinatown. An essay by Rachel Aydt. Online Exclusive: "Hands Chopping Air": on teaching ESL in Manhattan's Chinatown. An essay by Rachel Aydt.](https://broadstreetonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Chinatown_manhattan_2009-290x290.jpg)
Online Exclusive: “Hands Chopping Air”: on teaching ESL in Manhattan’s Chinatown. An essay by Rachel Aydt.
“In winter, the ubiquitous American elm trees are bare and the anemic playgrounds of these projects are empty; the concrete of the buildings appears heavy against the gray skies…. “And yet, in these cold public spaces, the neighborhood rises into life each day as my son, Jamie, and I make our way to school. The...
![From Our Pages: "Holy War: Ramadan and race riots in Senegal," by Patricia Smith. From Our Pages: "Holy War: Ramadan and race riots in Senegal," by Patricia Smith.](https://broadstreetonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Patty_01-290x290.jpeg)
From Our Pages: “Holy War: Ramadan and race riots in Senegal,” by Patricia Smith.
BROAD STREET presents this essay (recipient of a Special Mention from the Pushcart editors) from our “Hunt, Gather” issue (fall/winter 2014) … Here’s what happened during one holy season when Patricia Smith, a Fulbright scholar in Senegal, found a sudden war erupting in the small village where she’d been teaching high schoolers and immersing herself in the...
!["In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler," by Jamal Stone. "In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler," by Jamal Stone.](https://broadstreetonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Butler_signing-290x290.jpg)
“In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler,” by Jamal Stone.
by Jamal Stone Kindred, Octavia Butler’s 1979 best-seller, defies genre conventions. It is an intensely emotional novel that blends elements of sci-fi time travel with an antebellum first-person slave narrative. The novel takes African American protagonist Dana back to slave times at seemingly random intervals, leaving her to survive in a cruel world as she tries...