Almost weekly, I exchange drafts of poems with a friend, and we discuss them over the phone. He lives in Cambridge, and I’m in a fifteenth-floor apartment in Manhattan. My desk looks across West End Avenue to a building where men prepare to restore the facade. One leans over the railing of a steel scaffold,…
In nonfiction, our winner is Billy Lezra, for their piece “Mother’s Colors.” This year’s nonfiction judge was Augusten Burroughs. Of the essay, he writes: “The writer deftly brings a lifetime of trauma and fractured communication with their mother into focus with gorgeous writing and sharp details, skillfully drawing a Madrid neighborhood as a character as…
When I was seven years old, my parents noticed I had perfect pitch and could play almost anything by ear, so they started me on piano lessons. But I had trouble with my fingers: they were somehow never independent and my struggles to keep from bending two at a time made my wrists tighten. I…
Martín Espada, Jailbreak of Sparrows, poems (Knopf, April 2025) Jay Neugeboren, After Camus, a novel (Madville Publishing, 2024) Jay Neugeboren, Whatever Happened to Frankie King, a graphic novel illustrated by Eli Neugeboren (Graphic Mundi, 2024)
Robert Boswell recommends Big Time, by Rus Bradburd (Etruscan Press, 2024). “This novel is hilarious. A university has given up the pretense and is openly run by college sports, leaving professors to haggle over the rights to concessions at the big games—which is how they fund their departments. I laughed aloud maybe twenty times. Like…
Margot Livesey recommends Stranger from Across the Sea, by Regina McBride (Green City Books, 2024). “As soon as Violet O’Halloran arrives at St. Dymphna’s School and meets the blind girl, Indira Sharma, I was captivated by this evocative novel set in Ireland and New York. McBride’s characters are so full of longing and passion and I couldn’t wait…
Jay Neugeboren, After Camus, a novel (Madville Publishing, November 2024) Jay Neugeboren, Whatever Happened to Frankie King, a graphic novel illustrated by Eli Neugeboren (Graphic Mundi, November 2024)
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation …” —Gravesite of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Arlington National Cemetery (reinterment 1967), Quoting JFK’s Inaugural Address (1961) “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof,…
1. Lavabo y Espejo, by Antonio López García, is a painting of a bathroom sink and mirror. The sink, fused to the wall, floats. Its shadow grows west. The mirror above waits, empty, reflecting no person, only the square tiles of the opposite wall. On a transparent shelf between sink and mirror sit tools meant for…
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