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The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…

Around the time I began working on my MFA, I started to hear other writers talk about applying for residencies at “artist colonies.” I was new to the writing world, and I wasn’t sure what a colony was. I had the vague impression of a kind of commune: poets and painters hanging out in gardens,…

It’s hard to write sentences or poems with people singing songs in the background but I think that some other music – orchestral music, smaller music involving instruments, singers singing without words – is a great and inspiring thing to have playing next to you when you are writing.  I wrote a whole book listening…

This is a series about women writing life, but sometimes the lives we write are not our own. We may have a personal connection to the historical characters in our poems or we may feel an inexplicable kinship, an irresistible calling to tell their stories. I’ve been told that I have no claim on stories…

I can’t think of a New York City poet who hasn’t read at the Cornelia St. Café and I don’t know of one who doesn’t look forward to doing so again.  Tucked since 1977 into the block-long West Village street whose name it bears, the café hosts more than 700 literary, musical, and cultural events a…

Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption Nancy Mullane PublicAffairs 384 pages $26.99 American prisons hold over 140,000 lifers. Under the rallying cry “life means life,” parole is rare; some states have eliminated it. Graphed, the number of lifers over the past three decades looks like a steep mountain ascent, no cliff in…

Q: First things first: how did you become an agent? A: I resisted initially, spent five years trying to find a different calling, and finally realized that being an agent was exactly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I worked for an agent (the wonderful Irene Skolnick) the summer after…

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive and we encourage our readers to contribute in the comment section. The series will run on our blog…

I don’t want to write this review the way I’m expected to write it. I know I should keep the “I” out and pretend the thoughts I’m about to express come from some objective intellectual place separate from who I am as a person with a history. I could write it that way—I am capable…