In December 2017, I met with Geeta Kothari to discuss her work as a writer and as the nonfiction editor of the Kenyon Review. In February of this year, Geeta’s collection, I Brake for Moose and Other Stories, was published; she was also the editor of Did My Mama Like to Dance?: And Other Stories […]
Andromeda Romano-Lax began her career as a travel writer and freelance journalist before focusing on fiction. She has published in multiple newspapers and magazines from Seventeen to Steinbeck Studies. She cofounded the nonprofit, 49 Alaska Writing Center (Anchorage, Alaska) and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She freelances as […]
Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, and author, whose work crosses genres and mediums, and flows through a variety of philosophical questions while addressing intermediacy, relation, materiality, and the unnamable. In the early nineties, Dodge was one of the founders of the San Francisco community-based performance space, The Bearded Lady, which served as […]
I was lucky enough to be asked by the Horror Writers’Association to sit down with Tananarive Due for an interview that will be featured in the souvenir book for Stokercon, the HWA conference, where Due will be a guest of honor in the spring of 2017. The HWA is a non-profit organization of horror writers […]
In one of Michael Jaime-Becerra’s stories, “Lopez Trucking Incorporated,” the sixteen-year-old narrator climbs into the cab of the commercial rig belonging to his grandfather, a man who’s been estranged from his family—and perhaps himself—for years. “The rig smells like old smoke and leather,” the narrator observes. There’s a statue of the Virgin Mary sitting on […]
Todd Mitchell is the author of several award-winning novels, stories, and graphic texts, including the young adult novels Backwards (Candlewick Press, Colorado Author’s League Award winner), The Secret to Lying (Candlewick Press, Colorado Book Award winner), and the middle grade novels Species (forthcoming from Delacorte Press) and The Traitor King (Scholastic Press, Colorado Book Award […]
The best way to work across boundaries is to refuse to believe in them. This has always been a hallmark of art, and of black art more particularly. I don’t think that art accepts these artificial distinctions between theory and practice or between the discursive and the lyrical, between critique and celebration.
During the June 2016 residency of Antioch’s MFA program, Susan Southard taught a workshop on research-based writing, having written Nagasaki, a heavily researched and beautiful work of nonfiction about life after nuclear war. She explained that while John Hersey had written about the bombing of Hiroshima, no one had written about Nagasaki. Her workshop turned […]
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of five books of nonfiction including Reclaimers and the memoir/history, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize. Her work appears regularly in journals and magazines such as Orion, Brevity, High Country News. Her sixth book will be a middle-grade novel The Luckiest […]
In July 2016, I had the opportunity to talk with Donald Strauss, writer and founder of the Master’s of Arts in Urban Sustainability program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Don is also an urban cyclist who wrote a dissertation–he calls it a memoir manifesto–on how cycling culture has changed Los Angeles. He is an urban sustainability […]
Douglas Unger has published four novels and a collection of stories, including Leaving the Land, which won the Society of Midland Authors Award for best fiction, a citation from the PEN Ernest Hemingway award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Robert F. Kennedy awards. His fourth novel, Voices from Silence, was an “experts recommend selection” of […]
Sarah Van Arsdale’s deft, sympathetic portraits remind us that we are not alone in our struggle to be seen, recognized, and yes, even loved. She is a writer who is deeply engaged with questions of who we are and what we owe each other. Her clarity and precision immerse the reader in a world where […]
Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Immigrants In Our Own Land, published in 1979, the same year Baca was released from prison. Other poetry titles include Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train & 13 Mexicans (2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), […]
Feeling classically teenaged and outcasted in my freshman year of high school, I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999)—an epistolary novel by Stephen Chbosky, narrated by a young boy named Charlie. On the first day of school that year, I’d eaten lunch in a bathroom stall. Over the next ten months, I endured […]
Folks are never going to just change their mind about something because you tell them they should. They are going to change their mind because they feel a stake in it. Art is a tremendous way to create that kind of stake because it enables you to enter the experience of another person and see […]
Lois Dodd was born in Montclair, New Jersey. She attended Cooper Union in New York City, where she started painting. She was part of the New York Tenth Street art scene in the 1950s and was one of the founders of the Tanager Gallery in 1952. Her works are found in many museums, including the […]
Novelist Vu Tran was born outside of Saigon five months after the city fell to the North Vietnamese, immigrated to the United States when he was five, and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Likewise, Tran’s debut novel, Dragonfish (W.W. Norton, 2015), begins in Vietnam and intersects American and Vietnamese cultures. The novel opens in italics […]
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir (Bloomsbury USA, 2007), and The Still Point of the Turning World (The Penguin Press, 2013), which was a New York Times Bestseller and Editor’s Pick, and a finalist for the PEN USA Prize in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in numerous noteworthy publications such […]
Elise Capron is a literary agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Agency in San Diego since 2003. She represents many talented authors including Maureen McHugh, Jonathon Keats, and National Book Award Longlist, Cynthia Barnett. This interview took place on July 31, 2015 via Skype. * * * “Did you want video? You’re only […]
Lynell George is an LA-based, journalist, and essayist. Currently an arts and culture columnist for KCET’s Artbound, she has had a long career in Los Angeles journalism as staff writer for both the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly–focusing on social issues, human behavior, and identity politics as well as visual arts, music, and literature. […]
Richard Russo is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Russo grew up in Gloversville, New York, a small upstate town that once produced ninety percent of the nation’s dress gloves in its factories. Much of his work is inspired by his experiences of small town, working-class life. He has published seven novels, two short story collections, […]
Sonya Sones is the author of the young adult novels in verse Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, and To Be Perfectly Honest. She also wrote the adult novel in verse, The Hunchback of Neiman […]
Matthew Zapruder (born 1967 in Washington, D.C.) is an American poet, editor, translator, and professor. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Sun Bear (2014), Come On All You Ghosts (2010), The Pajamaist (2006), and American Linden (2002). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, The Believer, and […]
When I spoke with Nick Flynn, it was a Sunday afternoon in late May. Hot, humid, and there is no better way to say this—it was loud. The kind of loud that reminds you life is loud and busy and happening all at once. He was solo with his 7-year-old daughter […]
Allison Joseph is the author of six poetry books: What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003), Worldly Pleasures (WordTech Communications, 2004), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press, 2009), and My Father’s Kites: Poems (Steel Toe Books, 2010). […]
Kerry Madden-Lunsford grew up traveling around the South as the daughter of a football coach. Her first novel, Offsides, drew on her experiences, but is not an autobiography. She is one of the few writers authorized to write a biography of Harper Lee, Up Close: Harper Lee, which made Booklist’s Ten Top Biographies for 2009 for Youth. She […]
I recently interviewed Susan Straight on the telephone. During the first session, my recording software failed just as my two-year-old son woke up howling from an unusually short nap. A tired and hungry toddler is like an escaped rhinoceros; I have not quite worked out the glitches of single motherhood. Graciously, Susan allowed me to […]
Blas Falconer is the author of The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012); A Question of Gravity and Light (The University of Arizona Press, 2007); and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006). He is also a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity (The University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse: […]
I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at this blank page, fingers poised over the laptop’s keyboard. But it feels like a long time. A very long time. And my thoughts are all over the map; I see them as an army of impossibly tiny steer running in every direction and there’s me without […]
Jill Marr is an agent at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. She graduated from San Diego State University with a BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in History. She has a strong Internet and media background and nearly 15 years of publishing experience. After writing ad copy and features for published […]
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