Interviews
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On Poetry, Passing, and Trans Politics: A Conversation with J Brooke
“Do you know the Walt Whitman poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer?” Whitman is hearing this scientist spewing out all the facts and the figures and formulas. He gets all agitated, so he goes outside and looks up at…
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Making Revolution Beautiful: A Conversation with Sophie Lewis
“Without wanting to make things too neat, I think there is a continuity between projects insofar as maybe one could postulate the love letter is part negation of what kills us.”
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Maintaining the Energy for Activism When You’re Struggling to Pay Rent: A Conversation with Jules Wernersbach
“So you’ve got this rat-a-tat-tat of things to do riding the wave of your own internal nonsense. That’s the natural tension of being a human being at work. My challenge as a writer is to make space for both in…
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Two Countries, Two Identities Asking “Where Do I Belong:” A Conversation with Sofi Stambo
“When I was growing up, no one had time for anything, so if I didn’t say what I needed to say quickly—in two lines—the person I was talking to would have moved on already. They would be in another room…
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Read Everything You Can and Keep Writing: A Conversation with Tracy Lynne Oliver
“You just don’t know how long something’s going to take to get published in terms of a book. But start small: Start publishing little things; get feedback; get rejected; get accepted. That’s all part of it. Just do all of…
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Cruise Ships, Clowns, and Comedic Calamity: An Interview with Kathleen Rooney
“It bugs me that in our culture, animal stories are typically relegated to being “just for kids,” a bias which underestimates both animals and kids.Fiction is a form of magic that lets an author—and eventually a reader—inhabit any kind of…
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Temporary Utopias: Resisting Machine Mind and Cognitive Surrender with Eleni Sikelianos
“There’s a research element to many of my books, not just reading or looking into the archives, in the vein of investigative poetics, but also sensory investigation. Lately, I’ve been calling the books “ancestral encounters.” That seems to cover a…
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Do the Thing: A Conversation with Emily Rapp Black
“I feel more despair now than I did ten years ago; the global uncertainty, mostly. But part of being an artist is to say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” To me, that’s the truth of everything. People ask,…
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A Millennial’s Anthem on Travel and Multiplicity: A Conversation with Cinelle Barnes
“It’s only publishing that loves these silos and categories, because maybe it makes it easier for algorithms to streamline for sales. But I think it’s due time that we in literature embraced cultural and artistic multiplicity. The multi-narrative is the…
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“What African Feminism Makes Possible”: A Conversation with Minna Salami
“The point of books like mine and the wider canon is to help people take action. Action comes after one has had the idea powerfully illuminate a situation that is no longer sustainable. My book speaks to the deep psyche…
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“This is What I Survived:” A Conversation with Reyna Grande
I think part of the work of going to the border to do that project was not only to bear witness to what was going on there, but also to revisit a place that I myself crossed as a child.…
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Writing Nostalgia, Absurdity, and Displacement: A Conversation with Hasan Dudar
“Painting also just brings me a lot of joy. I find a lot of joy in applying colors to the canvas. You need that when you’re writing a book. The two art forms feed off each other. My writing, and…