Category: Interviews & Excerpts

Author Annie Hartnett in Conversation with Rachel Reeher

Annie Hartnett is the kind of writer that makes you laugh when you shouldn’t. The kind of writer that, in one moment, has you hoping no one is looking over your shoulder as you crack up over utter tragedy, and, in the next moment, has you welling up over the most perfectly executed joke. Nothing…
Olivia Ivings & Shane Snyder Talk with Poet Erin Carlyle about Grief, Memory, and Poverty in the South

I’ve known Erin Carlyle for twelve years. We shared living spaces for ten of them—first as partners, then as spouses—and in that time we struggled together. Struggled to find a place to settle. A place of stability. A place we could call home. It was a depressingly mundane American story defined by movement, money, and…
“Creatures of Culture and Perpetrators of Civilization”: Jiwon Choi Talks with Editors of Color in the Landscape of Modern Publishing

In 2015, Lee & Low published The Diversity Baseline Survey, giving us a rundown of who’s working in publishing, including small, medium, and large publishers. Their percentages are as follows: 79% White 7% Asian 6% Hispanic 4% Black 1% Middle Eastern 1% Native American These numbers take into consideration jobs across the board, from editorial…
Book Excerpt: Two Poems from What It Was Like to Be a Woman by Melinda Wilson

Melinda Wilson’s heroically tough and vulnerable book, What It Was Like to Be a Woman, relays this very information with grit and beauty. From childhood through to the present, Wilson’s poems illustrate that under patriarchy our bodies are never our own, and the struggle to keep what’s ours ours—mind and body—is one that spans a lifetime.…
Book Excerpt: Three from Tricia Middleton’s Novel-in-Verse Obsidian Situations

What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon.…
“Spirit Rock”: Matthew Sidney Parsons Talks with Wes Blake about His Book Pineville Trace

Wes Blake lives in Nonesuch, Kentucky, and is the author of Pineville Trace, winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize. Pineville Trace follows Frank Russet, as he sets off on a quest following a cat named Buffalo. After Frank escapes from a prison in Kentucky, his journey to find meaning in the absence of his…
“Something Can Die and Yet Persist Interminably”: A Conversation Around the Future of the Book with Ansgar Allen by S. D. Stewart

Ansgar Allen’s fictions roam like ruminants in search of fertile land from which to graze. Over the course of seven novels, Allen has traveled in nearly as many directions in terms of both style and substance. His latest, The Faces of Pluto, is perhaps his most inscrutable book to date. A dense whirlwind of interrogations…
Book Excerpt: Six New Clark Coolidge Poems from Radium Out Cold

These poems are a kind of pure poetry that reflects the the writer’s life work of interacting with language. For those who are drawn in, this work can take on an importance that permeates how we think and hear and see and live, complete with an ongoing sense of play and utter joy in the…
Bradford A. Masoni Talks to Suspect Gina Tron about Her New Memoir

Gina Tron is no stranger to raw honesty on the page. A prolific writer and poet, she has authored three memoirs, including her 2014 debut You’re Fine, praised by Interview Magazine as “vibrant, darkly funny, and courageously candid.” Her most recent memoir, Suspect, delves into complex topics like bullying, toxic female friendships, and the systemic…