Interviews

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections—Milk and Filth, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. Milk and Filth was a finalist for the NBCC Award. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. A former Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.

Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Visitation Street, which was chosen as an Amazon Best Book of the Month, Amazon Best Book of 2013, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, Self, and House & Garden. Her first novel, The Art of Disappearing (St. Martin’s Press 2009). She has a BA from Harvard College in Classical Greek and an MFA from Bennington College in fiction. Ivy grew up in Brooklyn, NY and currently lives in downtown Los Angeles with her husband Justin Nowell.

Major Jackson is the author of three poetry collections: Holding Company (Norton, 2010), Hoops, and Leaving Saturn. Leaving Saturn was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Book Review, and many other periodicals. Jackson has received awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and a honors from Witter Bynner. Jackson is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars and is the Richard A. Dennis Professor at University of Vermont.

Matthew Lippman is the author of three poetry collections: American Chew, winner of The Burnside Review Book Prize (Burnside Review Book Press, 2013), Monkey Bars (Typecast Publishing, 2010), and The New Year of Yellow, winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize (Sarabande Books, 2007). He is the recipient of the 2014 Georgetown Review Magazine Prize and The Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review.

Meg Wolitzer's novels include The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, and The Wife, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Wolitzer has taught creative writing at The University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Barnard College, the MFA program at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and recently she was a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier program at Princeton University. Currently she is on the creative writing faculty at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton. Wolitzer reviews books frequently for the NPR show All Things Considered.

Melissa Pritchard, Professor of English at Arizona State University and author of eight books, has received numerous awards, including The Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely published, she has received the O.Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize, twice each, and her non-fiction has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Wilson Quarterly, the Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions and the Chicago Tribune. She is the founder of the Ashton Goodman Fund, the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

Monica Drake is the author of the award-winning indie novel, Clown Girl, and The Stud Book, also a novel. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Paris Review Daily, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and other publications. She designed and runs the newly launched BFA in Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.

Pamela Painter is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ekphrastic Review, Flash Boulevard, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, JMWW, Michigan Quarterly Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Three Penny Review, and Vestal Review among others, and in the anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and recently in Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction of 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023. Painter’s stories have received three Pushcart Prizes and have been staged by Word Theatre in LA, London and NYC.

Roxane Gay lives and writes in the MIdwest. She is the author of Ayiti and, forthcoming, An Untamed State and Bad Feminist. 

Sarah Vap is the author of five collections of poetry. The most recent are Arco Iris (Saturnalia Books), named a Library Journal Book Best Book of 2012; and End of the Sentimental Journey(Noemi Press, 2013). She is a recipient of a 2013 National Endowment of the Arts Grant for Literature. Her first collection, Dummy Fire, received the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second collection, American Spikenard, received the Iowa Poetry Prize. She lives in Venice, California and is pursuing her PhD at University of Southern California.