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  I once spent a year working as literary editor for a group that produced radio plays—dramatic adaptations of American short stories, which were then broadcast on NPR and BBC. Though I was never more than a novice in the radio world, I loved it—the collaboration, the energy of the actors, the process of helping…

So! A quick caveat. By night, I’m a poet: I write, I submit, I sometimes get an acceptance, I get a bunch of rejections, and I submit again. Lather, rinse, repeat. There’s notoriously little money in poetry, however, so by day I work in the digital group of a publishing company. The caveat I mention…

Happy Life by David Budbill Copper Canyon Press, August 2011 122 pages $16.00 [Editor’s note: “Dear Dr. Poetry,” a new column by Shannon Wagner, will appear regularly on this blog.]   Dear Dr. Poetry When I sold my VW van to buy my first suit for a job at Mega Corp, my aura began browning…

I am Korean American and a writer. More often than not, I write about Korean American characters, though I don’t always focus on their ethnicity in my writing. I view ethnicity as one of many lenses through which one perceives the world, and it is by no means the most important one. Gender, age, class,…

If there exists a more solid foundation than this for a literary friendship, I can’t think of it: My words prompted readers to sever their connection with the publication. And my editor stood by me. This is the second in a two-part blog about Hala Salah Eldin Hussein, an editor/translator in Cairo, and the connection…

It took me awhile to understand that when a journal rejects your poem or short story, it isn’t an indictment of your character or a judgment of your ability as a writer; all they’re saying, really, is: “not this piece at this time.” I’ve never been one to take rejection personally, and I never thought…

Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life Vivian Gornick Yale University Press, September 2011 (Part of the “Jewish Lives” series of interpretative biography) 160 pages $25.00 In a new regular series, Anne Gray Fischer reviews books by or about “women in trouble.” Last month, when the city’s crackdown on Occupy Boston was imminent, a…

When Ploughshares Editor-in-Chief Ladette Randolph told me that I won the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s contest, I felt elated and grateful. Finally! A top literary journal was publishing me. I had been published before in several smaller literary journals, but this was Ploughshares. I believed I had made a career-altering breakthrough.

I’m delighted to devote this week’s blog post to someone who is taking a bold stand for literature. Three years ago, my agent forwarded me an e-mail from an editor/translator in Cairo. Hala Salah Eldin Hussein was interested in publishing some of my work in Arabic translation in her online literary journal, Albawtaka Review. Her…