When a young man leaves his home in Kansas City to find a career, he struggles to settle down in one spot. He wanders, impoverished, across the western United States and finds a transcendent understanding of the human condition.

When a Cuban American high schooler decides to attend college out-of-state, she must confront her ambiguous feelings about her family, hometown, and identity from a distance over the next several years.

A creative writing teacher sits through a conference with one his favorite students. He takes us on a journey through the characters in the story, and in his life.

After one of her young low-income students shows up to class disheveled, a female teacher from Chicago makes it her mission to create a strong bond with the girl in hopes it will prevent her from dropping out of school.

A professor finds himself attracted to one of his students, allowing her to skip the final exams - but her resultant grade causes her to lash out at him and reveal harsh truths about his own life that he finds difficult to accept.

A young girl attending a predominantly white New York City grade school in the 1950s watches the journey of one of her classmates — a girl of color with a disability — when an influential teacher helps her become more confident and comfortable.

A boy’s idolized uncle immigrates to the United States. As the child grows into a man in late twentieth-century Nigeria, his relative’s absence takes a toll on the family. When the two men finally meet up years later, the encounter reveals unfulfilled dreams.

Two jobless Harvard graduates who mostly read Marx and do acid reckon with the changing times since their days of revelry at university.

After a fifteen-year-old girl makes a bet with her father that after high school she will leave home to never return, her father takes her to the train station early one morning and tells her to leave. When she winds up in Los Angeles, she finds her way there, despite the fact that she does not feel free.

A college counselor watches anxiously as her teenage son applies to college without her help. As her son plans for his future, the counselor and her husband reflect on how quickly their lives have changed, seeking ways to steady themselves in the midst of middle age.