Interviews

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

Born and bred in New York City, ALEXIS TRICE has had an obsession with drawing and painting from a very young age, and flora and fauna have always been her subject of choice. After graduating from The School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Illustration, she started focusing on painting in oils. She creates … Read more

TO READ RAMONA AUSUBEL’S WORK is to experience a rebuilding of reality. She does this carefully. Empathetically. Like the stranger and the young girl from her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, who guide a small Jewish community into reimagining reality in order to survive the horrors of WWII, Ausbel uses metaphor and … Read more