Interviews

LEIGH NEWMAN’S WRITING is informed by her experience living in Anchorage, Alaska, where she grew up camping and fishing in the wilderness with her dad while splitting time with the mainland United States. Her characters, whether they are children dragged on a family trip to the bush, young women trekking to Alaska from Ag School, … Read more

KATHLEEN FLENNIKEN’S POETRY ranges from hard-hitting docupoetics to personal and domestic poems; in the words of Albert Goldbarth, “The surface range of Kathleen Flenniken’s . . . poems is admirably vast.” Her poems are emotionally-charged experiences characterized by intellect and honesty, and infused with a poignant national and ecological awareness. Flenniken’s humble, restrained style complements … Read more

MARY RUEFLE’S WORK SURPRISES and disrupts assumptions of what language is and what a poem can be. A reviewer for The Kenyon Review writes that Ruefle’s work is comprised of “masterful, associative poems [that] exhibit a sharp intellect demonstrable of a mind of brilliant inventiveness.” Her poems offer a mix of humor and gravity, and, … Read more

THE WEIRD AND THE WONDERFUL are more than welcome in the works of Carmen Maria Machado. Her prose explores the messy, and often grave, corners of the human experience all while playing with the typical conventions of literature. Machado reinvents our relationship with narrative by speaking to the reader directly: inserting imagined research to introduce a … Read more

EMBRACING IMAGE AND PERSONA, surreality and realism, form and disparate form, Nance Van Winckel’s poetry, fiction, memoir, collage, photomontage, and everything in between is as engaging an experience on the page as it is moving emotionally and intellectually. Throughout her work, Van Winckel contends with the personal, cultural, and political histories that shape people and … Read more

MOLLY GILES’ WRY AND QUICK-WITTED, observational voice has given life to female characters disenchanted with their circumstances and the underwhelming men that surround them. She is a master of the short form; her language is tight, precise, and caustic and her stories darkly comic. Her endings tum on a heartbeat, often surprising and always resonant … Read more

THROUGHOUT HIS WORK, Brandon Hobson presents stories of Native lives shaped by intergenerational trauma and atrocity and also by cultural continuity and hope. As his characters navigate familial separations and systemic racism, they find themselves in circumstances both relatable and astonishingly surreal. They discover and recover identity; they hurt, heal, fall in love, leave, and find home in a fractured contemporary society. … Read more

THE WONDER of Goldbarth’s work is in part its wild abundance, its ability to reach as far out as it can and, even within a single poem, move through a dizzying number of written modes and subject matters: quotes from scientists, artists, and writers, snippets of casual conversation, references to pop culture and historical figures, moments … Read more

WEAVING NATURAL IMAGERY with memories of the past and moments of the present, Ada Limón’s work explores both gender and race while incorporating elements of the surreal. The Los Angeles Review describes her work as being filled with “discovery, and rediscovery of self and world.” Limón’s poems guide her reader through her speaker’s self-exploration and encourage them to … Read more

IN SOME WAYS, Kevin McIlvoy is a musician first and a writer second. Although his career as a novelist is certainly longer and more widely celebrated than his tenure as a harmonicist, every word he’s ever put to the page has its own rhythm and melody. McIlvoy’s prose is as political as it is emotional, as … Read more