Laura Buccieri is the Director of Publicity at Copper Canyon Press. During the December 2020 Antioch MFA residency, Laura gave a seminar on poetry and publicity. I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with Laura over Zoom about her writing, her career in the publishing industry, and the film Parasite, directed by Bong Joon Ho.[…]
Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman wanted to be a professional violinist when she was a child, and in a way she kind of got her wish. Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named a Best Book of 2019 by Amazon, details Hindman’s life as the violinist in an orchestra whose performances pantomimed playing instruments to recorded music. Music that, yes, sounded vaguely like the soundtrack to Titanic. Hindman’s memoir recounts her time traveling with the orchestra in the early 2000s, a time of political turmoil that resonates with the early 2020s.
Julia Kardon is an agent at HG Literary who began her career in high school while shelving fiction at the Strand Bookstore. She received degrees in comparative literature as well as Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago and has used her experiences to help forge a path as an agent and, occasionally, as a crossword puzzle maker. She is the cofounder of Inkluded, Inc., an independent nonprofit organization that provides tuition-free publishing education. Julia Kardon is a loyal advocate for those she represents.[…]
I write about my friends and people I love. We establish a relationship on the premise, usually on the idea that I’m a writer and I would like to learn and I would like to write about what I learn. So, there is a conversation about representation and trust. […]
I really didn’t start writing what I thought was really good, good poetry until I was in my early twenties. I’ve been reading consistently, voraciously—everyone—not just Black poets, but every poet I can get my hands on, so I give that advice to other people.[…]
What I really appreciate about agenting—and you can’t say this about many jobs in the world—is that my job is to represent authors and projects that I love. I can’t and shouldn’t take on a project unless I genuinely love it. […]
think too many writers don’t do enough research about the business of writing. They focus so much on the craft, writing their books, polishing them up and then, they don’t know what to do. Also, the all-time end goal cannot be how to get published, but rather, how to stay published.[…]
As painful as it is to dig inside these memories, there’s something larger that I’m trying to explore. I want to examine it because my family is not the only one who has experienced it. Just like my brother’s death didn’t just happen to my family.[…]
In terms of isolation, I try to counteract that by building community, which I’ve done from the beginning, and by collaborating pretty heavily on a lot of projects.[…]
No one ever tells you, “Dying can be pretty hideous.” I don’t know if it’s because that sort of fear of dying oneself, you know? If you think too much about it, it can be scary. I think about it all the time, but that’s because I’ve lived it, and it was around me all the time.[…]
There’s this belief that if you apply enough technique in all these different ways, that you will end up with a novel. Technique is not everything. There’s a lot to recommend it, but the spark of life is something that the reader feels through the writer, and the writer has to feel it first.[…]
Genevieve Hudson is, both, grounded and a force of nature. She is wise beyond her years, genuine, insightful, and fierce, with a hint of ineffable magic. This special alchemy infuses her teaching, enabling her to engage students on a technical and emotional level simultaneously, meeting everyone exactly where they are while encouraging expansion and elevation […]
The things that tend to happen in some of the worst situations elsewhere, also do occur here, even though Americans pretend they do not. It is, in some ways, what Deaf Republic is about.[…]
The most important piece of advice I got from my first mentor was to get as broad of an education as possible without diluting it.[…]
Aditi Khorana grew up in India, Denmark, and New England, and has worked as a journalist for ABC News, CNN, and PBS, and also as a marketing consultant for Fox, Paramount, and Sony. All of this life experience adds up to a unique, empowering, fierce body of work, including two novels, Mirror in the Sky and Library of Fates […]
There is something wonderful about being able to write both fiction and nonfiction…. It does take
different kinds of brain work, which is really enjoyable.[…]
An impressionist painting: From up close, in the throes, the canvas is a blur of colors overlapping, brushstrokes smooth and coarse, repetitive, messy, dizzying, dazzling, dark, and light. But from a distance, the wildness of the expression appears tame. You see the oil painting for what it is: An intricate composition from the paintbrush of a master […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.