INTERVIEWS
Interview: Jo Ann Beard
Jo Ann Beard’s third book, Festival Days, is a truehearted work of art. Nine pieces lean into life’s difficult decisions and the daunting beauty within moments of uncertainty. Her writing masters precision in language, emotional urgency, and grief’s complexities.…
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Interview: Lara Ehrlich
The woman on the cover of Lara Ehrlich’s debut short story collection appears to be almost airlifted from the 1950s—she could be an actor from The Donna Reed Show or perhaps a model for LOOK magazine, all aproned and…
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Interview: Joyce Hinnefeld
Stories that Slip Sideways: An Interview with Joyce Hinnefeld by Ron MacLean Joyce Hinnefeld and Ron MacLean met as fellow doctoral students in the English Department at SUNY Albany in the early 1990s. They’ve stayed in touch since then,…
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Hybrid Interview: Matthew Salesses
Essay by Candace Eros Diaz • The first sentence of Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World reads, “[T]his book is a challenge to accepted models of craft and workshop, to everything from a character-driven plot to the ‘cone…
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Interview: Joy Castro
Joy Castro grew up in Miami, London, and West Virginia, and lived in Texas and Indiana before settling in Nebraska, where she is the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and directs…
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Hybrid Interview: Tara Isabel Zambrano
Essay by Kristin Tenor • Virginia Woolf writes in her novel Orlando: A Biography: “Nothing thicker than a knife blade separates happiness from melancholy.” Perhaps the same might be said by the characters inhabiting Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut short…
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Hybrid Interview: Chloe N. Clark
Essay by Jesse Motte • In a period of world history characterized largely by mandated physical distancing, Chloe N. Clark’s debut collection, Collective Gravities, is an important reference for navigating inner and outer spaces. The collection, driven by character…
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Interview: Leesa Cross-Smith
Inventive. Authentic. Honest. All these words have been used to describe Leesa Cross-Smith’s work, yet the same very well could be said about the author herself. Writer, wife, mother of two, unabashed Christian, she often credits her family and…
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Hybrid Interview: Megan Cummins
Framing the Stories: If the Body Allows It by Megan Cummins Essay by Laura Spence-Ash • The architecture of If the Body Allows It, Megan Cummins’s stunning debut story collection, is unique: there are two sets of stories within…
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Art of the Opening: Laura van den Berg
A friend tells you a story. It makes you pause each time you enter the bathroom, eyes sliding to the linen closet. Each time you pull a fresh bath towel from the shelf, the warm musk of cedar reaching…
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