Whether fraught, flipped, unconventional, tender, or messy, the relationship between a father and child is the stuff of legend. We’ve chosen these stories and poems for their wise and sometimes humorous take on the beauty, challenges, and above all, enormity of a father’s role.
Gbenga Adesina
Across the Sea: A Sequence
2020 Narrative Prize Winner
Your prayer is to the fitful sleep of the dead.
Ann Marie Bausch
Carry Me Back
Michael gave up all pretense of liking his stepdaughter.
Andre Dubus
A Father’s Story
She told it in bursts, like she was a child again.
Andre Dubus III
My Father Was a Writer
It was the six of us: my young parents and all four of us kids.
Carlina Duan
Rein
I love, I love I love my old man.
Ross Gay
Poem to My Child, If Ever You Shall Be
For now let me tell you about the bush called honeysuckle.
Louise Glück
Terminal Resemblance
2020 Nobel Prize in Literature
My father and I avoided being alone.
Donald Hall
Reading His Poetry
I woke with my father’s voice in my ear.
Maria Hummel
A Husband and Father
I was six when my father left to serve our country.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Someone Else Besides You
She was the first of my father’s mistresses that I’d seen.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Frantz Fanon
My father was trying to memorize the clouds before he died.