The Creative Process of Translating Text: An Interview With Dr. Erdağ Göknar
I spoke with Dr. Erdağ Göknar, an award-winning scholar, poet, and translator, about how his diaspora background contributes to his work, his approach to translation as a creative act, and the limiting factor of editorial expectations in publishing Turkish texts in translation.
Examining Our American Disillusion With Alberto Fuguet
I’ve been thinking too much about reality entertainment lately. It was inevitable that I would find myself reading Alberto Fuguet’s The Movies of My Life this summer, and I’ve been wondering: how does a country cope with disillusion? Or rather, how does a person deal with its dissolution?
The Varying Feelings of Jesus’ Son
Perhaps, in connecting the song’s teachings of drug struggles from the ’60s with those of the book and films of the ’90s, both similarities and differences across these platforms can provide intake on why the opioid epidemic either comes in waves, or never truly leaves.
Three Chapbook Reviews from the New-Generation African Poets (NNE) Box Set
The chapbook box set New-Generation African Poets, edited by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, is the fifth of its kind, an annual project of the African Poetry Book Fund, produced by Akashic Books. The set consists of chapbooks by poets either living in Africa or of African heritage.
Review: LIKE THAT by Matthew Yeager
One hundred pages, six poems. A hand holding a small ball of foil reaches across the center of the cover, finger stretched, insistent or offering.
Embracing My Identity as a Black Woman
When Performer Magazine prompted me to write about being a Black female music writer, I was apprehensive at first. But when that essay was published, I realized how inherently political my writing is—and how important it was for it to stay that way.
What Is a Story Before It Becomes Words?: Lynda Barry’s What It Is
What It Is is expressionistic and difficult. Before the techniques are imparted (and they are, eventually) Lynda Barry spends more than one hundred pages blending comic panels, short passages of autobiography, and gorgeous, bizarre full page collages that explore the fundamentals of craft and creativity.
The Readers: Hilton Als and the Queer Imagination
Recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for theater criticism, Hilton Als often writes about the intersections of performativity, popular culture, and reflection—that is, the ways art can and cannot reflect something resembling truth. I first found my way to his writing through his book White Girls.
Attention Span Training for Book Lovers
The internet giveth and it taketh away. What it gives readers is legion. What the internet contributes to taking away, however, is the ability to concentrate.
Confronting Our Environmental Apocalypse: Emerson and the Search for Reality
If we cut through the soft, friendly Emerson, we find that for all its optimism and apparent naivety, Emerson’s work is immersed in a mature, tragic vision that asks us to confront the mean aspects of life, the inherent limitations and necessary failures we all must face.