On any given Friday at Pomona College, lunchtime conversations can happen in Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Persian, Portuguese, Shanghainese, Swahili, Tagalog or Vietnamese. Following the demolition of the Oldenborg Center for Modern Languages and International Relations’s dining hall, language tables are now housed within Frank Dining Hall, offering a diverse range of 30 languages.
Yet on a campus where students regularly speak and study languages from around the world, Bowen Xu PO ’29 noticed something missing: few places for students to write in them.
That gap inspired the creation of Graft, the multilingual review of the Claremont Colleges, as a student-run literary journal that publishes creative and scholarly work across languages and cultures. The group held its founding assembly in October 2025, with Xu as editor-in-chief and Zena Almeida Warwin PO ’28 as co-editor in chief, alongside managing editor Liangjing Zhang SC ’28 and a larger team of editors, translators and designers.
Xu began envisioning the journal before arriving at Pomona. After learning he was accepted to the college, he remembered a Chinese literary publication he had encountered at another university and wondered what a version open to every language might look like. He envisioned a publication where one’s language was not a barrier to participation.
That idea appears throughout Graft’s pilot issue, “Dream.” Its table of contents moves across languages and forms. Work ranges from a Portuguese essay about the American flag on Marston Quad to a Spanish-language play about otherness to an interview with Khalab Blagburn PO’ ’27 about African American Vernacular English.
Its name reflects that deeper mission. In botany, grafting refers to the process of joining part of one plant to another so the two can grow together. Xu preferred the image to simply merging languages and cultures, where they coexist without interacting.
“Grafting is more organic and happening in real time, with real people,” Xu said. “We’re really trying to bridge a gap between literature in different languages.”
Putting Xu’s vision onto the page, however, raises the question of what happens when a piece moves between languages.
For Rochelle Lu SC ’28, Graft’s editor-at-large and TSL’s DEI & Outreach Director, that gap was already familiar. During her first year at Scripps College, Lu won a writing award for a piece in English that was later published in the Scripps College Journal. But as she flipped through the journal, she remembered a distinct feeling.
“I felt an absence looking at the English letters and words, feeling none of the familiarity that Chinese radicals and strokes I knew so deeply,” Lu said. “Deep down, I knew I craved a space full of linguistic diversity.”
“I felt an absence looking at the English letters and words, feeling none of the familiarity that Chinese radicals and strokes I knew so deeply,” Lu said. “Deep down, I knew I craved a space full of linguistic diversity.”
Lu joined Graft in September 2025 after Xu reached out to her about a column she had written in TSL on culture and identity. In her role as editor-at-large, she works on the journal’s creative programming.
Graft does not prioritize English translation. Its founding guidelines call the journal “multilingual at its core”. A translation is optional and does not necessarily have to involve English at all.
That approach has changed the way Lu thinks about translation. Rather than reproducing a piece word for word, she said, a translator can make choices specific to the language the work is entering.
“The translator could be poetic in their work or use a metaphor or idiom that only exists in the language they’re translating into,” Lu said.
That freedom, however, is exactly what makes literary translation difficult.
“Being proficient in speaking [a] language does not really qualify you for translating literature using the language,” Xu said.
The journal has struggled to find qualified translators. But Xu noticed that the process of creating the journal revealed how uncommon it was for multilingual students in Claremont to write creatively outside of English.
That scarcity complicates what it means to label a campus as multilingual. Some heritage speakers Xu has met want to reconnect with languages spoken by their families but have lost the habit of writing in them. Some international students, meanwhile, come to an American college wanting greater immersion in English.
Graft occupies the space between those experiences. Students do not have to submit work written in another language. The journal also accepts English-language work that examines language or culture.
For Kian de Torrontegui Bayno PZ ’27, a reader of the journal and facilitator at Oldenborg’s Tagalog language table, Graft’s value lies in bringing languages beyond classrooms and familiar cultural spaces into the broader Claremont environment.
“Nothing’s as important for preserving and continuing a linguistic tradition as bringing it into the public space, like what Graft is doing,” de Torrontegui Bayno said.
Xu imagines future issues experimenting with less conventional forms of writing, including computer code.
“You can write in Python, if that’s you,” Xu said, “Python is also a language.”
The journal’s founding plans also envisioned relationships with language departments, affinity groups and other campus literary publications. Xu hopes those connections can eventually grow into a festival around International Mother Language Day.
Graft’s experiment may ultimately be less about how many languages it can collect in one magazine than about the choices people make among the languages they already carry.
In the opening note of “Dream,” Xu writes about Jhumpa Lahiri, the Indian American author who chose to write in Italian, and Alessandro Ceschi, an Italian writer who published a book in Chinese. Their choices lead him toward an idea of linguistic freedom, that “we do not have to live only in our mother tongue.”
Yet linguistic freedom, Xu writes, is also “the ease of always being able to return to the most familiar, intimate language.”
Graft aims to make room for both choices: the freedom to write beyond the language you inherited and the freedom to come back home to it.
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