The Wise Owl - June 2025

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This month, we are thrilled to spotlight Jacqueline Jones, whose remarkable work No Right to an Honest Living: The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era (2023) was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. Alongside this, we bring you a captivating exchange with Bharati Shah, the celebrated Cubist whose bold lines and layered abstractions offer a singular lens on contemporary art.

Our Talking Books segment delves into cinema and geopolitics with Meenakshi Bharat, who discusses her incisive book Hindi Cinema and Pakistan: Screening the Idea and Reality—a timely exploration of how film mediates complex national narratives. In the creative sections, our global contributors bring forth a tapestry of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that both challenges and comforts. These are voices that carry wisdom, whimsy, and everything in between.

​The Review pages turn their focus on The Patchwork Quilt, a tender and resonant collection of poetry, while our film review of Adolescence offers a nuanced reading of youth caught between becoming and being.

​Our Wise Owl Picks for June serve up literary nourishment in many forms: The Infernal Machine by Steven Johnson, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore, and Random Circles of Belief by Nishi Chawla. Each of these texts presents a unique invitation into worlds strange, stirring, and thought-provoking.

​In Visual Arts, we turn our gaze to Los Angeles, where the 23rd Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (IFFLA) 2025 unfurled a stunning showcase of films from South Asian creators and diaspora voices. We also speak with Noopur Sinha, Festival Producer at IFFLA, who reflects on the evolving tapestry of global storytelling.

​Our final feature pays homage to Fumika Tanaka, a traditional Japanese artist whose meditative practice anchors us in the grace of legacy, craft, and quiet power.