Features & Reviews
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More Than Just a Single Identity: A Conversation with Camille T. Dungy
Camille T. Dungy discusses her prose debut, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, traveling across America as a black mother, and spaces of inclusion and exclusion.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #108: Akhil Sharma
There is no pretention here toward lasting fulfillment, but there are quiet dinners of lentils and rice.
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The Strain of Reality: Reset by Ellen Pao
A woman is simultaneously too many things and not enough at all, forcing her vibrancy to smudge into an opaque blur.
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A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith discusses her new collection Good Bones, how motherhood has changed her writing, and what it felt like to have a poem go viral.
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Chewing Rocks: A Conversation with David Biespiel
David Biespiel discusses his new book, The Education of a Young Poet, being comfortable in uncertainty, and extending moments in writing.
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What to Read When It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month
A list of books that offer various ways to understand what breast cancer means in our lives, individually and collectively.
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Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
In Thousand Star Hotel, the bilingual writer’s struggle with expressing himself in English becomes a metaphor for the immigrant’s struggle with navigating the host nation’s hostile-yet-lucrative social terrain.
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President of Smut
Our country has always been ruled by and for the privileged, but never has this glaring injustice in the system been made so shamelessly clear.
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An Answer Should Lead to Another Question: Talking with Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout discusses Conflation, a vinyl recording from Fonograf Editions that “interrogates the difference between texture and tactile; thing unspoken versus thing unseen.”
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The Universal Tether of Identity: Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin
At its core, the collection is recollected through a loose chronology of memoir essays, all of which will appeal to readers’ younger selves: who were we when we were teenagers and who are we now?
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It’s All Finger-Pointing at the Moon: A Conversation with Carolyn Zaikowski
Carolyn Zaikowski discusses her most recent book, In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse, the psychology of repetition, and honoring the power of language.
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What to Read When It’s Been a Hell of a Year
Each of these books, in various ways, wound the crank on my empathy machine, and reminded me that telling a story can be a defiant act.