What Do I Gain From Citizenship—and What Do I Lose?
There are rules to who gets to live the American dream, and who doesn’t.
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passport
I stayed silent. After all, I was an independent twenty-five-year-old woman! I had my pride. How could I go back penniless after living in America’s streets paved with gold?
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Bix Gabriel is a writer, teacher of creative writing, editor at The Offing magazine, 2021 Periplus Fellow, co-founder of TakeTwo Services, occasional Tweeter, and seeker of the perfect jalebi.
She has a M.F.A in fiction from Indiana University-Bloomington, and her writing appears in the anthology A Map is Only One Story, on Longleaf Review, Catapult, Guernica, and Electric Literature, among others. Her debut novel, Archives of Amnesia, was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
She was born in Hyderabad, India, and lives in Queens, NY.
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Writers Who Eat: Ross Gay Conversation with Bix Gabriel
“I’m writing about my relationship with the land, and I need to get from sorrow to debt to gratitude.”
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Each time I am lured by the mirage of progress, someone knocks at the door and I am reminded of being thirteen and having nightmares about ICE at our door.
When Your Mother Country Becomes a Foreign Land
I grew up in the in-between: white, Hispanic, a pigment of mixtures that blended unevenly.