Writer
I’m delighted to share that my personal essay “Multitude of Hosts” appears in the new issue of Barnstorm Journal, from the University of New Hampshire. The piece begins as a meditation on the candle that sits by my side as I write and opens to a range of memories from my childhood across Bosnia and Spain. Huge thanks to the editors!
My new personal essay, “The Squirrel at the Monastery,” appears today in World Literature Today Weekly. Huge thanks, as always, to Editor Michelle Johnson for her attention, trust, and care! ❤️
Last week, I held a workshop at the American School of São Paulo, with the 10th and 11th graders who are interested in creative writing. I spoke about my writing path and my childhood in Bosnia and Spain and read them a flash essay about my parents’ weekend house just outside of Sarajevo when I was little.
The students were from Brazil, China, S. Korea, and the States, and during the session, they wrote about their own childhood neighborhoods and the people who inhabited them. One wrote about a man who’d come down the street, piled up with boxes, to bring his family their weekly fruit delivery. A couple of others said the exercise brought up memories they didn’t know they had.
It was an energizing, deeply engaged session, and I was left wishing we could have had more time together. I also heard from one of their teachers that a couple of students asked whether “Miss Lana could come back.” ❤️
I’m delighted to have my personal essay—filled with childhood memories from Bosnia—in the November issue of World Literature Today. It’s an honor to be included in this beautiful, thoughtful magazine for the second time this year.
The piece mentions a traditional Bosnian stew, and I include my dad’s recipe at the end. 
When it was accepted, I also bought a butterfly mug to celebrate, which you’ll appreciate if you read the piece.
Huge thanks to the editors of Barnstorm Journal for publishing my personal essay in their December issue! I wrote the piece years ago, after a memorable trip to Sedona. I’m thrilled it found such a beautiful home, and—as always—I’m grateful for our writing community and all the writers and editors out there who look over one another’s work with care. ❤️ You can read the piece on their site, as well as hear a recording of me reading an excerpt. Hope you enjoy it!
Phenomenal writer Alina Stefanescu has reviewed Voices on the Move, the anthology of refugee writing to which I was honored to contribute in 2020. The book, edited by Domnica Radulescu and Roxana Cazan, is filled with impactful and diverse voices and includes a range of creative pieces. Stefanescu’s review, “The Aliens Created by Nation-States,” is available on WorldCityLit.
My flash essay, “Women Like Them,” appears today at Hawai’i Pacific Review. It processes an early student experience and features a turkey vulture! Big thanks to the editor, Tyler McMahon, for including it.
I’m thrilled to announce that the anthology Voices on the Move, to which I contributed a personal essay last year, has just won first prize in nonfiction in the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation annual writing contest! Congrats to editors Roxana Cazan and Domnica Radulescu, and to all the other contributors!
My personal essay, “Geography of Peaks and Dips and Lights,” which appeared online earlier this year in The Rumpus, will be reprinted in the upcoming anthology Voices on the Move: An Anthology by and about Refugees, available for preorder now from Solis Press. This multi-genre anthology explores the nuances of displacement. About the book, novelist Samrat Upadhyay writes:
“Voices on the Move is a moving, must-read artistic exploration of migration and the trauma of displacement. Through diverse modes of expression—poetry, fiction, photography, play—the voices in this collection present the multitudinous ways with which we experience uprooting and belonging. The book is a jewel, a chronicle of our times, an intense awareness of humanity’s suffering and its yearning for home.”
Lana Spendl 