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In January, Safia Elhillo’s debut collection, The January Children, brought her poems to my doorstep, and many others, as it became Amazon’s top new release in African Poetry. I had the chance to chat with Elhillo about her collection and to discuss what it means to be a writer during this shameful moment in American history.
Since Chad Post, founding publisher of Open Letter Books, created The Three Percent blog in 2007, the term the “three percent” has become a household one to highlight the percentage of translated books published in the United States.
Monica Youn’s poems are precise, sharp-edged and fleet-footed; they always seem to be moving in three different directions at once. She is the author of three books of poems: Blackacre, Barter, and Ignatz, and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A former attorney, she now teaches at Princeton and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson. We caught up via email at the start of the new year to talk about the similarities between poets and lawyers, her latest book, and what might be her next one.
2017 came, and I was in the market for words to live by. I needed a mantra to get me through the month of January. Miraculously, I found them four days into the new year: “We’re all special once we get to know each other.”
I found these words in “heroes” by Brandon Soderberg, Baltimore City Paper’s Deputy Editor and Arts Editor. The words came after a description of a Baltimore seven-year-old who was shot and killed last year.
Erin Wunker teaches and researches in the fields of Canadian literature and culture. She is chair of the board of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) and co-founder and managing editor of the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe.
Claire Vaye Watkins, author of the celebrated collection Battleborn and widely acclaimed novel Gold Fame Citrus, talks with me about writing and living the West, conservation and resistance and optimism in the world of Trump, and faith in the “California experiment.”
Linda LeGarde Grover’s fiction and poetry reveal Native American lives in ways that don’t cater to expectations or alienate non-Native readers from gaining a deeper understanding of the culture.
Brit Bennett talked with me about her new novel “The Mothers,” and about the power of place–writing in the West through many communities–“performing California-ness,” the weird excitement for wildfire season, forever building piers into the ocean, and In-N-Out burger.
Bodies in literature always bear the first marks of difference. What isn’t recognized as “normal” (meaning, not perceived as male, cis, straight, white), always verges on the monstrous, to be rejected or feared, or at the very least cloaked in mystery.
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