interviews

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, The Giant’s House, Niagara Falls All Over Again, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, Bowlaway, and the forthcoming collection of short stories The Souvenir Museum.  She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Thunderstruck & Other Stories won the 2015 Story Prize. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The O. Henry Prize, The New York Times Magazine, and many other places.

Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most eminent and prolific contemporary literary figures, is the author of fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. Her more than fifty novels include Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart; Black Water; Mudwoman; Carthage; The Man Without a Shadow; A Book of American Martyrs; My Life as a Rat; and Blindsight (Ecco, 2020). She teaches at Princeton and is a founder of and an editor at The Ontario Review.

Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, espnW, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Nichole Perkins is a writer and podcast host from Nashville, Tennessee. She hosts This Is Good For You, a podcast about finding pleasure in life, and previously was a co-host of Thirst Aid Kit, a podcast about pop culture and desire. Nichole is the author of Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be, a memoir, and Lilith, But Dark, a poetry collection.