June 26, 2019
Verve {in} Verse: In Conversation with Jared Harél
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. […]
June 26, 2019
Music and Silence: A Conversation with Kelly J. Beard
Kelly J. Beard’s first full-length memoir, An Imperfect Rapture, won the 2017 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award. Before becoming an author, Kelly practiced employment discrimination law in the […]
June 25, 2019
Risk and Reward: A Conversation with Andrew Farkas
Andrew Farkas is the author of a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press), and two short fiction collections: Sunsphere (BlazeVOX Books) and Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press). His work has […]
June 20, 2019
Repetition Is Political: On Walking Alone, “I Have a Dream,” and Morgan Parker
In 2016, I attended a weeknight concert at the Showbox in Downtown Seattle that got me thinking about walking as a political act. The headliner that night was riot grrrl […]
June 19, 2019
Ken Kesey’s “Keyhole of Literature”
In an essay published in The New York Times in 1989 (incidentally, the year I was born), Ken Kesey recounts a writing lesson he once received from short story writer […]
June 18, 2019
“To create a world of belief”: A Conversation with Adrian Gibbons Koesters
Adrian Gibbons Koesters is a novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer whose work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hotel Amerika, Berkely Review, Prairie Schooner, 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction, […]
June 17, 2019
Eddie Schmidt Recommends: an Academy Award- and Emmy-nominated TV/Filmmaker Tells You What to Watch
Eddie Schmidt is an Academy Award- and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker, as well as a showrunner and director of acclaimed nonfiction series. Six of his projects have premiered at the Sundance […]
June 13, 2019
Open Secrets: Alyssa’s Secret, Christina Rossetti, and the Closet
The challenge was to create a commercial for a new brand of perfume. Expectations were high: not only were the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 5 expected to concoct, bottle, […]
June 12, 2019
Eric J. Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
Often as conceptually layered as the texts it considers, for a current project I recently looked again at To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1994), Eric […]
June 10, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – June
But does poetry actually change anything? Does it need to? Maybe poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Or maybe W.H. Auden is right that […]
June 10, 2019
A Decade of CantoMundo: In Conversation with Celeste Guzman Mendoza & Deborah Paredez
This past weekend was the last year of a 10-year term for Co-Directors Celeste Guzman Mendoza and Deborah Paredez, who along with Carmen Tafolla, Norma E. Cantú and Pablo Martínez […]
June 7, 2019
On the World War II Novel
Writing fiction about World War II from the vantage of the twenty-first century presents a rare challenge. Of all of history’s wars, this one has always felt the most uncomplicated, […]