Universal Table

This anthology invites interviews and memoirs, fiction, and poetry about the experiences of U.S. citizens (teenagers through adults) who are citizens primarily through paper, having spent most of their lives living in other countries. Perhaps their parents are U.S. citizens working or living abroad. Perhaps they have dual citizenship because of their parents' cross-national marriages. Perhaps they were born in the U.S. by happenstance or intention to parents who then returned to their own countries of origin.

We're interested in those who have chosen eventually to use their citizenship rights, coming to live and work and vote in the United States, as well as those who have chosen to retain their U.S. citizenship but to keep their cultural distance.

We're also interested in the experiences of ex-pat parents, raised in the U.S. but living for long periods or permanently outside the U.S., whose children may hold challengingly different attitudes toward the value of U.S. citizenship.

Questions we invite people to consider include:

What does it mean to you to be a U.S. citizen?

• What rights does it give you?
• What privileges?
• What baggage?

If a dual citizen:

• Which country do you feel greater allegiance to? Why?
• How does belonging to two countries affect your sense of what citizenship means?
• How would you feel if restricted to citizenship in only one country?           

If your parents don't have U.S. citizenship:

• What options does your having U.S. citizenship open up for you and your family?
• Does it make you feel more or less loyal to the country you live in?
• If you have U.S. citizenship and your siblings don't, how has this affected your career aspirations -  or theirs?

If you are U.S. raised citizens and parents now living semi-permanently abroad:

• How is your sense of the importance of U.S. citizenship different from that of your children who have been raised primarily abroad?
• What conflicts have these different experiences caused?
• What efforts did you make to develop your childrens' sense of American identity?
• How have these differences in viewpoint influenced your understanding of the import, both the responsibilities and privileges, of U. S. citizenship?