Interviews

Thomas Lynch is Milford, Michigan’s funeral director, a job he took over from his father in 1974. Through his examination of death and mortality, Lynch has found much inspiration for his writing. But to label his work as being about death would be an oversimplification. A 1998 Publishers Weekly review stated that “The combined perspectives of his two … Read more

Dorianne Laux is the author of four books of poetry. Her most recent collection, Facts about the Moon (Norton, 2005), was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She recently published a chapbook called Superman: The Chapbook, and co-wrote, with Kim Addonizio, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasure of Writing … Read more

Born in Monroeville, Alabama, Mark Childress comes from a southern family and grew up in Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Though he continues to move every four or five years, it is because he writes about the South, Childress says, that he is identified as a southern writer and often placed alongside Harper Lee, Flannery … Read more

Lynn Emanuel was born in Mt. Kisco, New York, and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Denver, Colorado. Surrounded by an extended family of artists, and raised by a businesswoman mother, Emanuel distills her early experiences into a potent cocktail, rewarding diligent readers with unpredictable, meticulously crafted, hyper-aware poetry. In typical Emanuel style, a poem about … Read more

Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington, to logger parents—her mother was a choker-setter and her father was a spar-tree rigger. The fact that she lives in Port Angeles now could make her life seem deceptively simple. Gallagher has lived and traveled all over the world. She has graduate degrees from the University of Iowa … Read more

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

A NATIVE OF WEST VIRGINIA, Ann Pancake is the author of a short story collection, Given Ground, winner of the 2000 Bakeless Fiction Prize, and last year’s novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, which, according to Rick Bass, “crackles with this century’s great white background noise of loss, greed and dishonesty.” Pinckney Bene­ directly refers to Pancake as … 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

David Shields is one of today’s most controversial writers and also one of the most passionate. Jonathan Lethem says of Shields: “While on the one hand I feel the urge to compare Shields to the very most incisive and smart contemporary essayists I know—Phillip Lopate and Vivian Gornick and Geoff Dyer— in another sense he’s accomplished … 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