Interviews

side by side series of the cover of Girlhood

“Girlhood is a much darker, more complex—more amazing—experience than what that association suggests”: An Interview with Melissa Febos

The essays of Febos’s new essay collection read less like a coming-of-age story than they do like a manifesto of all the ways girlhood takes a toll on a girl’s life, as well as of the cultural experience of being a woman.

side by side series of the cover of Star 67 by Gina Tron

“We are this horrible animal, all of us”: An Interview with Gina Tron

If we are to rest on the definition of poetry Major Jackson has offered, American poets “write in the wake of a long tradition of resistance.” In responding to American violence with both intimacy and anger on the page, Tron engages in just such an act of resistance.

side by side series of the cover of correctional

“My hope is this book is not simply a literary artefact, and that it is used for more than my own personal redemption”: An Interview with Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar’s new memoir positions traumatic memory and its Hartmanian alignment with a paradoxical capacity for both knowledge and nescience at center-stage: the reader is warned that the tale to be told may in one sense be fictive as much as factual, but that it will, nonetheless, be told truly.

side by side series of the cover of stay safe

“I’m considering and reconsidering ideas of storytelling and history within a family”: An Interview with Emma Hine

Emma Hine’s debut collection of poetry, out earlier this year, is a book focused on three sisters that behaves like a constellation surrounded by an ever-blackening sky.

side by side series of the cover of Velvet Was the Night

“When you’re in the middle of it, you’re not necessarily doing the right thing or being the good character in a story”: An interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Set in 1971, just three years after the Mexican government massacred student protestors at Tlatelolco, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s seventh novel follows a bored secretary and a member of the anti-communist paramilitary organization the Hawks as they both find themselves looking for a missing young woman.

side by side series of the cover of Miller's Tender the River

“Nothing lasts, nothing is solid, as much as we think it will be”: An Interview with Matt W. Miller

Matt W. Miller’s fourth book chronicles in documentary poetics the history of the Merrimack River, braiding together its many voices from the perspective of the twenty-first century, when the insistence of memory resides everywhere and in everything: people, the river, the land, industry, relationships—in short, in one’s spirit.

cover of Event of Contact

“I’m not sure we ever arrive at wholeness”: An Interview with Ethel Rohan

Ethel Rohan’s stories are expertly laced with opposition and convergence, a curled fist and an open palm. Her most recent collection—out this week—features relationships rife with both dissonance and confluence, characters in pairs and triads stretching away and snapping back together.

side by side series of the cover of Negative Space

“All memoirists are the narrator and the character at once”: An Interview with Lilly Dancyger

Lilly Dancyger’s just-released mixed media memoir is a story of two artists, forever separated, and the history and symbols that provide an artistic shorthand able to move past the boundaries of shared experiences and meet again.

side by side series of the cover of Of Women and Salt

“A lot of the novel is about stories—the ones we tell ourselves about ourselves, the ones we don’t know but that shape us in some way”: An Interview with Gabriela Garcia

Gabriela Garcia’s non-chronological debut novel, built on glimpses of memory and history, digs into issues of cultural identity, social and political unrest, and the complexities of lives informed by migration, oppression, and racial inequality.