Interviews

LARRY HEINEMANN NEVER EXPECTED TO BE A WRITER. In Black Virgin Mountain, his most recent publication (2005) , he tells us, “I came to writing.. . .because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn’t going away anytime soon.” That story began publicly in 1977 with Close Quarters, a novel in … Read more

MICHEAL JAYME IS A NATIVE OF EL MONTE. A graduate of the University of California, Riverside, his early work was collected in 1996 as Look Back and Laugh for the Chicano Chapbook Series, edited by Gary Soto. The following year he began publishing under the surname “Jaime-Becerra” and shortly thereafter a limited-edition collection of prose poems, entitled The Estrellitas Off … Read more

A NATIVE OF IVANHOE, VIRGINIA, David Huddle served as an enlisted man in the Army during the Vietnam War. After returning to the United States, he completed his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia. He went on to attain additional degrees from Hollins University and Columbia University. Of his education he says, “I couldn’t have … 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

Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern as a “post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the United States’ one and only truly global poet.” He may have had little choice in the matter. Born in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, he grew up in an ethnically diverse Pittsburgh, where he became friends with the … Read more

KIRSTEN SUNDBERG LUNSTRUM WAS BORN IN CHICAGO and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a BA in English and writing from Pacific Lutheran University and an MA from the fiction writing program at the University of California, Davis. Her short fiction has appeared in Calyx and Willow Springs, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her first … 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

Lan Samantha Chang was born to Chinese immigrants, who left China when the communist government came to power in 1949. Her parents moved to the small Midwestern city of Appleton, Wisconsin. Chang said that since her Midwestern youth, she’s “constantly been moving, perhaps unconsciously to replicate my parents’ experiences.” Her books—a collection of stories, Hunger (1998), … Read more

Melanie Rae Thon is the author of two collections of short stories and three novels, including her most recent work, Sweet Hearts, which is set in the forest and plains of Montana. She has had other work published in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review and Story. She won the Whiting Award in 1997 and an NEA grant in 1992. … Read more