"A family sits around a fire pit in their backyard on the Cahuilla reservation in Southern California in a scene from “Menil and Her Heart,” Isabella Madrigal’s thesis screenplay.

“Do you know who gave the arts to the Cahuilla people?” the father asks his two daughters. Menil, the youngest, says no, and the father tells the story of her namesake, Menil, the moon maiden, who “painted the world into being.”

Weaving together old family traditions of oral storytelling with modern mediums like screenwriting and acting is a skill Madrigal ’24, an English ...

The Harvard Crimson recently featured a list of works from eight must-read female poets, including Tracy K. Smith's "Life on Mars." A description of the poetry collection is included below:

"A former U.S. poet laureate and current professor at Harvard University, Tracy K. Smith is known for her high-minded and cerebral poetry that juxtaposes existential musings with the mundane actions of everyday life. The larger cosmos is never far from her work, nor are surprising and subtle elements of science fiction. In her must-read poem, “Universe as Primal Scream,” Smith...

Neel Mukherjee’s "Choice" is a novel full of characters deciding how much truth to tell. As in "The Lives of Others," the author’s 2014 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, we are confronted with subtle, powerful narratives within narratives exploring the gap between wealth and poverty, myopia and activism, fact and fiction. But here these themes deepen into an exploration of free will. A line from V.S. Naipaul’s "In a Free State" comes to mind: “The only lies for...