‘A Totally Wild Idea’: The Writing and Realms of Eloise Klein Healy On a sunny September day in Sherman Oaks, California, a gray Portuguese water dog greeted me at the door of prolific poet and publisher Eloise Klein Healy. If it’s all right, I have some things to show you, Healy said as she […]
I grew up loving Sherlock Holmes. I’d read all fifty-six stories and four novels multiple times before I was twelve years old. And he represented power to me. I mean, I was a small kid in a big neighborhood. And I wasn’t a badass. But language just seemed like a form of power. Intelligence seemed like a form of power. To know that Sherlock Holmes could control his world with just a brain seemed amazing to me. And so, he was always my alter ego. … I never considered writing any other character but a Sherlock Holmes character.
Ashaki Jackson began her career as a social psychologist and program evaluator before focusing on the craft of poetry. Ms. Jackson was a Cave Canem fellow and a poetry activist. She also cofounded Women Who Submit, an organization that helps women with the submission of their literary work to bring about more gender balance in […]
During Antioch’s June 2016 residency, my mentor suggested I pick up a copy of Matt de la Peña’s Newbery Medal-winning picture book, Last Stop on Market Street, to explore the effective use of diversity in children’s literature. When I returned home to Arizona, I not only picked up a copy of de la Peña’s book, […]
Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee. The New York Times and Kirkus Review named Deón’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Grace, a Best Book of 2016. She is a practicing attorney and law professor, and creator of the popular LA-based reading series, Dirty Laundry Lit. Her works have appeared in American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, and other places. Deón is the […]
I get so tired out by the need to defend literature’s usefulness in terms of these measurable, moral and productive terms. Obviously this is important for humanity, thinking about our own interior experiences and how they bump up against other people’s interior and exterior experiences, so I always feel tired out by the weak position of literature and always having to defend it in this capitalist society, or usefulness-driven society. …
Dara Hyde loves books. After a decade as an editor and rights and permissions manager at the independent publisher Grove Atlantic in New York, Hyde moved to Los Angeles to become an agent at Hill Nadell. Hyde represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including young adult, genre fiction, graphic novels, narrative nonfiction, and […]
I read Tara Ison’s first novel, A Child Out of Alcatraz, shortly after its publication in 1997. I’d spent a good chunk of my own adolescence in San Francisco living in Fort Mason while my father was stationed at Oakland Army Base, across the East Bay. At the time, Fort Mason was a smattering of […]
Fady Joudah was born in Austin, Texas to Palestinian refugee parents. He spent time growing up in both Libya and Saudi Arabia, and returned to the United States to complete his medical education. He currently works as a professional physician in Houston, Texas. Joudah is the author of three original works: The Earth in the […]
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, […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.
We’ll keep you fed with great new writing, insightful interviews, and thought-provoking art, and promise with all our hearts never to share your info with anyone else.
