This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Join NOW!A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePoet Erin Hoover discusses her debut collection, BARNBURNER.
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreKate Angus of Augury Books and Joe Pan of Brooklyn Arts Press discuss the challenges and triumphs that come with running an indie press, and the recent decision to make Augury an imprint of BAP.
...moreA weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreJoin H.I.P. Lit, VIDA, and The Rumpus for a riveting night of readings and aerial performances at our 2017 Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend event!
...moreAt Longreads, Jennifer Hope Choi traces a line between a birthmark, a family history, and an ethnology. For VIDA, Mirene Arsanios reflects on language, translation, and the power that an editor wields.
...moreEmily Raboteau discusses her essay, “Know Your Rights!” from the collection, The Fire This Time, what she loves about motherhood, and why it’s time for White America to get uncomfortable.
...moreJeremy P. Bushnell discusses his new novel, The Insides, themes of consent, and designing a post-apocalyptic board game.
...moreAt The California Sunday Magazine, Brooke Jarvis has a devastating piece about missing persons and family members lost over the border. For VIDA, Jean Ho shares her discouraging experience at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. And here at The Rumpus, Chellis Ying writes about rock climbing in China, which turned out to be an opportunity for both thrills […]
...moreI met one of my favorite writers before she ever published a single story. We were classmates vying for our MFAs in Creative Writing from Florida International University and would smile at each other from across the room. She was shy, but never defensive, in workshop and always strove, really made the effort, to answer […]
...moreFerrante’s novels about women like Lila and Lenu are a potent reminder that working-class women’s perspectives are out there, even if we can’t always hear each other, even if we’re sometimes embarrassed and alone, even if we feel exasperated by a system that valorizes experiences and credentials that we can never claim. At VIDA, Valeria […]
...moreLeigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as “an idea that someone else pushes back on.”
...moreBecky Tuch discusses founding The Review Review, motherhood, creativity, and the future of literary magazines.
...moreWriting as art can be what economists call a “non-market” activity. The time we spend writing poems or novels, like the time we spend doing laundry, is usually time not spent earning a dollar, even if we hope to see payment for that work down the line. But unlike domestic work, it can be difficult […]
...morePoet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.
...moreJezebel’s Jia Tolentino discusses “the end of the era of the important, inappropriate literary man” in context of the sexual abuse allegations against Iowa Workshop visiting professor Thomas Sayer Ellis. She posits that social media is allowing victims more visibility and power as they speak out against their abusers who have previously been protected by […]
...moreThe Lulu Fund is a new organization founded by Anna March, Ashley Ford, Jen Fitzgerald, and Ashley Perez dedicated to breaking down barriers within the writing community. The Lulu Fund mission statement says: We support individual writers and organizations who demonstrate their commitment to these ideas by telling critical stories and lifting marginalized voices. Lulu offers financial […]
...moreTo refuse to disappear at mid-life—I am forty-two as of the writing of this essay—is perhaps the best rebellion a woman poet can make to the literary world and to the world at large.
...moreOver at Salon, Erik Anderson tackles the “implicit whiteness of Literature,” hoping for a VIDA-like count devoted to writers of color.
...moreDear Aimee, So the latest thing (why is there always a latest thing) is that a white man used a Chinese name to submit poems that were then chosen for Prairie Schooner and then included in Best American Poetry 2015 which of course has a lovely poem of yours in it too! Your first appearance, you said. The scandal no one […]
...moreIn Episode 11 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, Cate Marvin discusses her new collection, Oracle, marsupials, and why she’ll never write a prose poem.
...moreElisa Gabbert asks the hard questions for Electric Literature: When the VIDA counts come out and multiple publications are shown to publish far more men than women (with the numbers for POC writers looking even worse), editors make excuses about their submission pools – they get far more submissions and pitches from men than women. Then people […]
...moreThe latest VIDA count might have some disappointing if unsurprising results, but there are empowered women involved in the literary community if you know where to look. Danielle Lazarin compiled a list of journals run by women over at The Review Review and reflects on her choice to focus on these journals: Most of my […]
...moreThe message sent to women that what they are writing isn’t important or serious enough is not a new one. It is as old as literature itself. And its persistence has everything to do with how women’s literature is treated in college and university classrooms and, in turn, how it is treated in the literary […]
...moreThe Writing the Future report . . . found that the “best chance of publication” for a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) writer was to write literary fiction conforming to a stereotypical view of their communities, addressing topics such as “racism, colonialism or post-colonialism as if these were the primary concerns of all BAME […]
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