Interviews Archive
“Editing is the great joy of writing”: An Interview with Michael Bible
Bible is a careful craftsman, cutting his new novel down to its core without losing a diverse cast of characters, a clearly rendered town, and wholly realized emotional resonance. He doesn’t overexplain, doesn’t excessively detail, and doesn’t deviate from the novel’s heart.
“Much of this novel is about queer and trans people fighting to see ourselves as sacred”: An Interview with Zeyn Joukhadar
In Joukhadar’s new novel, during the search for what seems almost to be a mythical bird, and for an explanation as to how exactly a disappeared artist and the protagonist’s mother are linked, Nadir also begins searching for his transgender identity—a separate and daunting migration all his own.
“We are this horrible animal, all of us”: An Interview with Gina Tron
If we are to rest on the definition of poetry Major Jackson has offered, American poets “write in the wake of a long tradition of resistance.” In responding to American violence with both intimacy and anger on the page, Tron engages in just such an act of resistance.
“We shouldn’t just turn inward when we walk”: An Interview with Kent Russell
Russell’s most recent book, chronicling a walk from the panhandle of Florida to the celestial city of Miami, comes to the conclusion that a walking journey should not only be a journey about the self, but also about how the self exists in a built environment.
“My intention in everything I ever write is to leave no traces of quotidian design”: An Interview with Carlos Lara
Lara’s latest collection of poetry is avowedly anti-thematic, anti-linear, post-itself. It is, in the speaker's own words, simply "some moments imbued with the crass economy of self."
“It’s the coolest part about writing, that you never know where it is going to wash up”: An Interview with Maggie Smith
Smith’s first nonfiction offering is a product of a project she took on in a time of grief: she took to Twitter to offer herself a daily public pep talk in the form of three sentences or less. The resulting works, segmented in the book by paragraphs of hindsight
“The characters in the novel are shameless about their bodies”: An Interview with K-Ming Chang
Part myth, part bildungsroman, part queer love story with a lyric, fabulist delivery, Chang’s debut novel, out today, is a novel of the body—its mundane functions, its power to create life, the ways in which it decays—as well as what can be done to a body—by war, from domestic
“When does that line between the real and imagined begin to blur?”: An Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
While Addonia’s new novel gives us innumerable examples of what is missing from the lives of his characters, living in a refugee camp after their country is swept into war, each is combatted with a bout of illusion, a tactic to conquer the absences and to enliven what remains:
“I used to think that I had to choose between the page and the musical aspect of it”: An Interview with Kelly Harris-DeBerry
Harris-DeBerry writes about freedom like someone who has felt the word in her mouth for years, felt the shape and sound of it, and has used the instruments of her voice and her page to translate it into something we can all understand.
“Racism makes it difficult to love yourself”: An Interview with Matthew Salesses
Salesses has written a novel of doppelgängers that begins forging its own double, attempting to confront the vast problems of racial inequality both in its plot and in its meta-structure, asking if there might be a parallel world for our own, one where these injustices could be corrected—or if