Ralph Ellison
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #214: Sarah Kersey
“A poem cannot exist without form or structure, just like the human body can’t operate without a skeleton.”
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Praise the Bottom: A Conversation with Malcolm Tariq
Malcolm Tariq discusses his debut poetry collection, HEED THE HOLLOW.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #193: C.J. Farley
“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
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This Thing of Existence: Talking with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new story collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU.
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Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #84: Susan DeFreitas
Picture this: a curbside juggler with a rose between his teeth. That’s the opening image of Susan DeFreitas’s powerful debut novel, Hot Season. Vivid (and sometimes strange) images strike again and again, conjuring ponderosa pines, cafés, old houses, and new…
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Harlem Is Nowhere
A new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago takes visitors through the collaborative efforts of writer Ralph Ellison and photographer Gordon Parks: In some ways, their collaboration is akin to a great songwriting duo… One handles the music, the…
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #22: Classic Novels That Are a Joy to Read
Sometimes we bypass the classic novels on the way to the rich offering of current literary fiction. Fair enough; there is so much to love in today’s fiction. But once in a while, dust off a classic gem and consider…
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Writing from the Basement
I never bring my computer with me to the basement, and the discipline of the method is to force myself to work out the ideas, the arrangement of the argument or story before I start building paragraphs and sentences. For…
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Do Authors Use Symbols on Purpose?
In 1963, a high-schooler named Bruce McAllister decided he would prove to his English teacher once and for all that the symbols she was asking students to find in books like The Scarlet Letter were not actually put there on purpose by…
