Interviews

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry: Lucky Fish, winner of the Hoffer Grand Prize for Prose and Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano; and Miracle Fruit. Poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Quarterly West, New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Tin House. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship in poetry, the Glenna Luschia Prize from Prairie Schooner, and the Angoff Award from The Literary Review.  She is professor of English at State University of New York at Fredonia.

Akhil Sharma is the author of the novels Family Life and An Obedient Father, which won the 2001 Pen Hemingway Prize. An acclaimed short story writer, he has been published numerous times in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York City with his wife Lisa and teaches at Rutgers, Newark.

Amy Gerstler’s most recent books of poetry include Dearest Creature, Ghost Girl, Medicine, and Crown of Weeds. Her book Scattered at Sea will be published by Penguin in June, 2015. She teaches at the University of California at Irvine.

Da Chen is a Chinese author whose works include Brothers, China's Son, Sounds of the River, Sword, and Colors of the Mountain. A graduate of Beijing Language and Culture University and Columbia Law School, Da Chen lived in the Hudson Valley in New York but has recently moved to Torrance, California with his wife, the paranormal romance author Sunni, and two children. Brothers has been awarded best book of 2006 by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald and Publishers Weekly.

David James Poissant is the author of The Heaven of Animals: Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2014). His stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The New York Times, One Story, Playboy, Ploughshares, and in the New Stories from the South and Best New American Voices anthologies. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida and lives in Orlando with his wife and daughters.

Don Lee’s novel The Collective, won the 2013 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. He is also the author of the novels Wrack and Ruin, Country of Origin, and the story collection Yellow. He has received an American Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Fred R. Brown Literary Award. His stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, GQ, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. For many years, he was the editor of Ploughshares. He teaches in the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. Photo: Melissa Frost

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including Project X and the forthcoming The Book of Aron, and four story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize. Five of his short stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College.

Lia Purpura is the author of seven collections of essays, poems and translations. Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, and the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction. Recent work appears in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. She is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a member of the core faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop. A new collection of poems, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin) will be out in 2015.

Louise Mathias was born in England and grew up in England and Los Angeles. Her first book, Lark Apprentice, was chosen by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Prize, and a chapbook, Above All Else, The Trembling Resembles a Forest, won the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her latest collection, The Traps, was published in 2012 by Four Way Books. She currently splits her time between Joshua Tree, California and a cabin on Donner Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Molly Antopol’s debut story collection, The UnAmericans (W.W. Norton), was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award and received a 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming on NPR’s This American Life and All Things Considered, online at The New Yorker, and in many periodicals, including The New Republic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Elle, Ecotone, Oxford American, One Story and American Short Fiction. She teaches at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and is at work on a novel.