July 29, 2019
Interview with Preti Taneja
Preti Taneja teaches writing in prisons and universities. She is the 2019 UNESCO Fellow in Prose Fiction at the University of East Anglia, a Leverhulme Research Fellow in writing and […]
June 25, 2019
In Pursuit of Rapture: An Interview with Molly Reid
In 2017, I spent a week teaching a prose workshop at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. It was there that I met Molly Reid, a writer and doctoral student who […]
March 13, 2019
“Dark comedy, violence, and haunted irony”: A Conversation with Christina Milletti
Christina Milletti’s novel Choke Box: a Fem-Noir won the Juniper Prize for Fiction and is forthcoming from University of Massachusetts Press in March 2019. Her fiction, articles, and reviews have […]
May 11, 2018
A Conversation with poet July Westhale
The Necessity of Dangerous Poetry and the Power of Voice July Westhale visited Kirsten Ogden’s class at Pasadena City College in April 2018 and continued a conversation with students over […]
May 7, 2018
Nepantla: An Anthology (Q&A with Editor Christopher Soto)
To celebrate the release of Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, published by Nightboat Books, anthology editor Christopher Soto and I discussed both the editing process and […]
May 3, 2018
“It’s sexy, filthy, viscous, vicious. It’s religious. It’s archaic”–an interview with Montreux Rotholtz
A mélange of language by turns surreal and objective, with narrative poems intertwined with those more driven by sonics and music, Unmark is Montreux Rotholtz’s first book, and it’s a […]
December 1, 2017
On Mitski, Anne Carson and failure
Sitting at my desk trying to focus, trying to write, I keep going back to two interviews. The first, by the amazing musician Mitski (check out Bury Me at Makeout […]
August 25, 2016
First Book Interview with Sarah Bartlett
Winner of the 2014 Subito Press Book Prize, Sarah Bartlett’s Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Out, her first collection of poetry, is a debut that doesn’t feel like one. Divided into three […]
March 15, 2016
Nothing and Something–an interview with poet Rob MacDonald
As Resuscitation Party is your first full-length collection, I’m curious as to a) how long it took to put together, and b) who you were reading while writing it. Are […]
November 2, 2015
A Conversation with Mike Rose – PT I
The first interview in a series about the intersections of writing, teaching, & identity Mike Rose is the son of working class Italian-immigrant parents who settled in South Los Angeles in […]
September 26, 2015
Interviews & Influences: Please Excuse This Poem & Rescue Press
Following up on earlier posts about the new anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, the editors Lynn Melnick and Brett Fletcher Lauer recently announced that all […]
September 2, 2014
The Wonderful Worlds of Borges
I recently came across an edited set of interviews with one of the true masters, Jorges Luis Borges. The book is Borges at Eighty: Conversations. I first encountered the Argentinian […]