Interview |
A Conversation with Juan Felipe Herrera
“One of the first songs I learned was ‘Contraband de El Paso.’ It’s about being picked up by border patrol and taken to Leavenworth. I used to sing that when I was a child.”
Interview |
“Disturbing the Surface”: A Conversation with Page Hill Starzinger
“About my writing life as a copy director at Aveda … At a cosmetic company, copy was approved by multiple departments. So I was relieved to write whatever I wanted on weekends, to be just as complicated, fragmented, moody, negative, and idiosyncratic in my own poetry as I wished.”
Interview |
“I Couldn’t Look Away”: A Conversation with Kathleen McGookey
“When you become a parent, what’s essential is what you’re going to get done. That same thing is happening in my poems. They’re including only the essential detail and emotion.”
Interview |
“Genes, Grief, Poetic Form, and Love: A Conversation with Charlotte Pence”
“We carry ‘home’ within us through our ancestors’ DNA. And that goes for those whom we love as well – they’re always with us, even when they’re not.”
Interview |
“Don’t Disturb This Groove”: A Conversation with Major Jackson
“I often seek metaphorical language that could open up possibilities of understanding my nature, all the suffering as well as the ecstatic. That search becomes a singular obsession, for it is where readers experience eternity, where mysteries are revealed.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Megha Majumdar
“I started writing my novel several years ago, paying attention to how state oppressive systems operate upon certain groups of people — and now the book is launching into a similar moment of examination and attention paid to these discriminatory oppressive systems.”
Interview |
“The Impersonal Intimate”: A Conversation with Carol Moldaw
“I think of a poem as an open-ended inquiry. Sometimes I feel like I’m making a case, though I only discover through building the poem what the case may be. Perhaps that idea comes from my one year of law school, but I’ve always felt strict about language.”
Interview |
A Conversation with David Moloney About Barker House
“I wanted to illustrate how working in this confined place, with rules, policies, procedures, takes away your individuality, even your voice. The institution wants the inmates to all look the same, because it strips them of freedoms. But they also want the officers to do the same.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Carolyn Forché
“I think there’s ancestral memory, there’s deep memory in our DNA carried from generation to generation. I think in the depths of our being as a species, we recognize this moment, we recognize the threat.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Lydia Davis
“For a long time, Grace Paley’s approach was my model: politics, family, and friendships first — and writing second. I may have that wrong, or may be idealizing, but that seems to me at the moment a good balance.”
Interview |
The Black Book Interactive Project: A Talk With The Scholars
“BBIP created a pipeline for new critical discoveries by examining novels that hadn’t been subjected to extensive data analysis. The metadata schema unlocks information not visibly associated with race. Diving deep into the work tells us more about literary culture and responses.”
Interview |
A Conversation with Carl Phillips on the 100th Anniversary of the Yale Younger Poets Prize
“From the start, I had a diversity of submissions, and this seems to have been the result of my having been announced as the judge. As soon as that happened, there was a lot of conversation among writers of color and queer writers, suggesting that they felt the Yale series was becoming more open.”
Interview |
Food, Drink & Poetry: A Conversation with Emily O’Neill
“I think of the emotional connection between big life events and food, like — what was I eating when my dad died? Was I eating when my dad died? Or what do you eat when you break up with someone, or what do you eat when you’re depressed?”
Interview |
“The Mystery of Persistence” // a Conversation About Poetry with G. C. Waldrep, curated by Victoria Chang
“When I was at Iowa in the MFA program, I was surprised by how many of my peers weren’t waiting to be astonished. As readers, they went to literature for something else.”