One of the biggest challenges of writing my novel Kantika, with its story inspired by my endlessly unfurling family history, was figuring out where to begin and where to end. At one point, I had a chapter set in 1957 New York about my mom’s (true!) battle—as an idealistic, knowledge-seeking college student, the left-leaning child of Sephardic immigrants—with the administration of Queens College over academic freedom. It didn’t make it into the book, but current times being what they are, the story kept calling out to me, and so, with the continued help and blessing of my ever-inspiring mom, Suzanne Graver, I reworked it into short story form. Thank you, The Adroit Journal, for giving it a home and naming it an Editors’ Prize finalist. You can read the story in its entirety here.

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