"Moving the Saints: Passages from a Deconstructed Homeland" is named a notable essay in BAE 2024.

“Moving the Saints,” from the Spring 2023 issue of Orion, was included as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2024. Read the piece here. Orion’s “The Language of Nature” issue includes work by Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, and others.

“Saussure talk about the signifier and the signified, but what happens when you can’t tell them apart? A mirror, like language, is a construct of duplicitous depth and direction, capable of true and lies in equal measure, and haven’t we always hoped to walk through glass and find a god we didn’t make, pull the moon from water and never drown?”

— Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, "Moving the Saints"

"Brittle Stars" in Orion.

“Brittle Stars” was published in the Winter, 2020 issue of Orion. You can read (or listen to me reading it) here. This essay would not have been possible without my editor, Sumanth Prabhaker. Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2024.

Photo credit: Alvaro Esteves Migotto

“In those days, we were held by water. I came into being by an abyss. The deepest sea in the world. My parents raised me on a forty-three foot sailboat in the Southern Hemisphere. For twelve years, the world settled on us as brine and brushed our toes with kelp. Even now, when I think of touch, I think of ocean.”

A new, lyric essay forthcoming in StoryQuarterly.

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My lyric essay, "Three Myths from the Northern Mariana Islands," is forthcoming from one of my favorite literary magazines, StoryQuarterly. The essay is divided into three parts, or three myths, from my native islands, the Marianas, also known as the Isles of Sails and the Isles of Thieves: "Creation Myth," "Myth of the Ancients," and "The Myth of the Lourdes Spring." I'm heart-happy and honored to be included in the issue, and I'll let you know when it drops.

'Life after Life' published in Arrive Magazine.

'Life after Life,' explores my father becoming unhoused and my becoming a guardian to two small children on three days' notice. The piece has been published in Arrive, Amtrak's on-board magazine.

Thanks, too, to Editor-in-Chief Leigh Flayton, art director Rob Smith, and publicist Whitney Peeling.