Interviews

On September 25, 2007, the MacArthur Foundation named Stuart Dybek a 2007 fellow, noting that his work “dramatizes how a new storytelling tradition takes shape; his writing borrows from the literature and iconography of the Old World yet emerges from the New World—from the speech and streets and music and movies that feed the imaginations of … Read more

Marvin Bell is the author of nineteen books of poetry and essays, the most recent of which, Mars Being Red, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. “What sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s,” according to Publisher’s Weekly, “also brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily … Read more

IF THERE IS A FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT of contemporary poetry, it may be Robert Wrigley. Just as each of Wright’s buildings is a unique expression of an organic aesthetic vision, Wrigley’s poems are constructed from the material of their moment. And just as Wright’s architecture depends on unity of site and structure, Wrigley’s books present a … Read more

JONATHAN LETHEM HAS CALLED AIMEE BENDER’S work “visionary, but close to home.” Her short fiction has appeared in such places as GQ, The Paris Review, and Harper’s. Her first story collection, The Girl In The Flammable Skirt (Doubleday, 1998) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and spent seven weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller … Read more

CONTRIBUTING TO A ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION celebrating The American Poetry Review’s 25th anniversary, Yusef Komunyakaa described a vision of American poetry: “Ezra Pound beside Amiri Baraka and H.D. flanking Toi Derricotte, Joy Harjo back-to-back with Frank O’Hara and Garrett Hongo alongside William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens—a continuum of impulses and possibilities that creates a map…” While … Read more

MARILYNNE ROBINSON WAS BORN and raised in Sandpoint, Idaho. After graduating from Brown University in 1966, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in English at the University of Washington. While writing her dissertation, Robinson began work on her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), which received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. … Read more

Jean Valentine has characterized Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s work as a “fierce homage to the body and to the spirit.” Landscape may have influenced the intensity of this homage; Goldberg grew up in the harsh Arizona desert, where she currently resides. “Death is the eternal problem,” Goldberg says. “I can’t write without that awareness—to me it’s constant…. … Read more

According to psychologist Robert Moore, “When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution.” As a groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called “the expressive men’s movement,” Bly remains one of the significant American artists … Read more

Amy Tan has said that Louis B. Jones possesses, “one of the best minds of our generation.” This is high praise, but Jones is certainly a writer of uncommon skill and care, for whom the importance of writing lies in the everyday practice of art rather than the relentless pursuit of fame. He states that … Read more

Lawence Sutin grew up in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. His parents, whose oral history he chronicled in Jack and Rochelle: A Holocaust Story of Love and Resistance (1995), were Jewish partisan fighters during the Holocaust. “Given that I was raised in a family where there was a legacy of pain,” he says, “there was a … Read more