Immediately upon entering Carl Phillips’s spartan, Cape Cod writing studio—all wood and windows, abutting some forty acres of conservation land—two things catch the eye: an antique horse bridle, worn but handsomely preserved, on the wall, and an old-fashioned stand-up writing desk in the corner. Both objects open windows onto Phillips’s writing life and a poetry…
“I am not easy, but I am worth knowing,” C. D. Wright says of herself, and her friends would agree. Petite and graceful and usually soft-spoken, C. D. Wright’s outward demeanor at once reveals and belies her wholly original personality, which is graceful but large, considerate but unconventional: “I am pretty neat, but there’s considerable…
Cornelius Eady spent his entire childhood in Rochester, New York, a destination for many African Americans during the early twentieth-century migration. Though Rochester had once been a frontier town known for its radicalism and such famous residents as Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, by the time Eady was born there in 1954, it had…
Perhaps it is so much transatlantic travel that has made Margot Livesey into an expert literary smuggler. In person, Livesey, born in Perth, Scotland, in 1953, and now living near Boston, is charming and agreeable. The same could be said, at first glance, for her fiction. Livesey’s writing is eminently readable. You scarcely notice as…
Jorie Graham is the kind of poet whose life is nothing less than cinematic. She was born in Rome in 1950 and grew up there. Her father, Bill Pepper, was the head of the Newsweek Rome bureau; her mother, Beverly, is a sculptor famous for her totemic structures. As a child, Jorie hid inside old…
Hall as Young Artist Approaching his mid-seventies, Donald Hall is — as he frequently reminds people — an old man now. Yet the term old can encompass a long shelf life, and no American writer has done more to honor the reality of time and generation than has Donald Hall. He’s given detail, definition, and…
Heather McHugh is wired. She is also wireless (see laptop, below), wry, and webbed (spondee.com). She speaks in passionate flurries, seriocomic riffs that only begin to reflect her speed of thought. She annotates as she speaks, offering first and second answers, embellishing and revising and punning. Words are her sparks and her flame. “As the…
Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, grew up on a reservation surrounded by poverty, alcoholism, and disease, and, against the odds, emerged to become a scintillating, multifaceted author, voted by both The New Yorker and Granta as one of the best American writers under forty. In less than nine years, he has produced three novels,…
Gish Jen lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, eight-year-old son, and one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, and the hectic pace of her life is reflected in her rapid-fire speech. The celebrated author of two novels and a collection, Jen is known for her humor and brimming intelligence, her ready opinions and easy laugh, her charm, and, not…
No products in the cart.