“Though there is ordinarily no language for pain,” Elaine Scarry writes in the introduction of The Body in Pain , “under the pressure of the desire to eliminate pain, an at least fragmentary means of verbalization is available both to those who are themselves in pain and to those who wish to speak on behalf of others”.…
Writer, editor, educator, and collaborator Tisa Bryant does not merely write across genres; she stretches them, the boundaries between memoir, criticism, and theory pulled taut until they give way to …
Any work of erasure constitutes, by definition, certain frictions: a negotiation of authority; a wrestling with the vicissitudes of technique; and an unavoidable contretemps with the overtly …
Imagine: you are a nonbinary cowboy in small-town America, and your lover has just left you. There’s nothing between you, your loneliness, and the beckoning desert. What do you do to soothe the …
It is rare that a publisher receives a manuscript that causes a somatic response, a verge of tinge and contracture, emitting saffron light, smooth to the touch, waxy like soft-bodied …
Philosopher Brad Evans, a Professor at the University of Bath, grew up in the Rhondda valley in Wales. In How Black Was My Valley , he has fused a personal memoir with a people’s history. In recent …
Abbie Kiefer’s debut poetry collection, Certain Shelter (June Road Press 2024), is a book that’s easy to connect with. The poems are honest, tender, and sharp. Kiefer writes with love for those …
Samyak Shertok’s debut collection, No Rhododendron, was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. The collection itself feels like a circular strand of …
A few days after my grandma was formally diagnosed with ALS, she wheeled into an appointment with her neurologist – a man who had ignored her requests for ALS testing for over a year – with a …
Aza Pace’s debut full-length book of poems, Her Terrible Splendor , hovers in a space where poetry meets incantation. Conjuring the mythic figure Circe, the collection lyrically explores …
Matthew Zanoni Müller and I first met in 2008 as wide-eyed incoming students at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. After graduating, we kept in periodic touch over texts and …
“May you live in interesting times” is a curse I’ve thought about often, especially in the context of reading. Who am I if I retreat to the fantasy of the page when so much of the …
“A person has to get used to the idea that we live among mortal remains”: this is what Mimì tells his childhood friend Lello and his girlfriend Nina, and this is also the key to …
In Dino Enrique Placentini’s novel The Invasion of the Daffodils , a young boy named Chico Flores finds a crate of daffodils washed up on the cove of an island. He and his brother plant the …
The first time I heard Jennifer Tseng speak was in 2019, at a reading from her novel Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness. The reading was a part of her job application for the open assistant …
“You know when you watch a movie and there's a crumbling bridge and somebody's running, trying to make it to the other side?” Flores told me, describing the mad dash of writing that allowed him …
Even as she draws on autobiography and research, Rojas Contreras maintains her sense of wonder, likening herself to a shapeshifter who appreciates being changed by stories.
In 1930’s Denver, Luz Lopez is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, is run out of town by a violent white mob. She begins to have visions of her Indigenous homeland in the …
What the novelist Rudolfo Anaya did for New Mexico, or what cultural critic Fran Lebowitz does for New York City, Raquel does in BROWN NEON for Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Tucson. Every generation …
The God of this novel is infinite, inside everything, and yet its absence can be felt on every page. This diffuse and elusive God requires a different kind of prayer, one that is collective and …