Ariana Benson (she/they) is a Southern Black, award-winning eco-poet from Norfolk, Virginia. Black Pastoral (University of Georgia Press, 2023) is her debut collection of poetry, which has won several prestigious awards. She is a recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2025), the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (2024), Cave Canem Poetry Prize (2022), Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and Porter House Review Poetry Prize and a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist (2023).

Peter Lefcourt sits in his California home, a place far removed from the Queens neighborhood where he grew up, as we chat on Zoom. He’s a veteran of Hollywood’s battles—a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright whose career has spanned six decades of American culture wars, from the counterculture of the 1960s to today’s digital, political polarization. His novels, including The Dreyfus Affair, Di and I, and The Deal, have become cult favorites, admired for their dark humor and willingness to skewer sacred cows.

Jason Prokowiew’s War Boys is an astonishing memoir that tells two interwoven stories. In the first, a young boy in Minsk gets caught in the devastating violence of World War II and spends his childhood fighting to survive. After his family is murdered and his hometown is reduced to rubble, he must find ways to survive as an orphan in war-torn Europe.