Place & Identity: An Anthology of Personal Essays

We don’t often think about how the deepest parts of ourselves interact with where we are. We may grapple with feelings of not belonging in the place we are in, whether it is our home of thirty years, the home of our families, or a place we have never been to. Or maybe we are celebrating that a part of ourselves finally feels accepted. Regardless, the activity of parsing out intersecting pieces of our identities and revealing how they relate to a place can be painful. It is not something we are often encouraged to do, and the act of shining a light on our truths can feel both liberating and scary.

In this anthology, the contributors reveal through their unique perspectives how they navigate places because of identity, as well as how places interact with their identities. Through this exercise, we see how similarly or differently we move through places. We can incorporate others’ experiences into our thinking about the world, but also read about those experiences that connect us. When we begin to think about the places we inhabit from day to day and then touch on how we interact with them, we begin to uncover the complexity of this interaction.