Interviews

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

MANY REVIEWS of Charles D’Ambrosio’s work compare it to the short stories of Raymond Carver, Thom Jones, and Denis Johnson. D’Ambrosio is the author of an essay collection, Orphans (Clear Cut, 2004), and two short story collections: The Point (Little, Brown, 1995), a PEN/Hemingway Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, … Read more

WILLIAM KITTREDGE WAS 35 WHEN HE STOPPED ranching on his family’s huge Eastern Oregon spread to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning his MFA in 1969. In the subsequent decades he has become a distinctive voice of the Western experience. In his memoirs, essays, and fiction he has explored the legacy of the agricultural West, and … Read more

MELLISA KWASNY COMES FROM THE GREAT tradition of poets writing in dialogue with the natural world, from the direct-address influence of Sappho, to H.D.’s treatment of nature as a character. Her first book of poems, The Archival Birds, was published in 2000 by Bear Star Press, and her latest book, Thistle (2006, Lost Horse Press), won the 2005 Idaho … 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

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

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

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