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10 Questions for Yuemin He

December 2, 2024 - By Staff

Your mouth feels bitter if you haven’t spoken for long
Not speaking for a long time, this bitterness
occurs, like a gallbladder
full of darkness and in darkness trembling
—from "Bitterness in the Mouth" by Zhang Zhihao, Translated by Yuemin He

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Valdmir Nabokov for his penetrating thinking, erudition, and beautiful language command from reading Lolita, Pale Fire, etc.

Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji for its simplicity

Works by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Wang Wei, and other traditional Chinese poets for their sheer beauty

Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and T. S. Eliot for helping me dwelling in the...

10 Questions for Alan Grostephan

November 18, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
My first translation project was poems and short stories by young Colombian writers for Historias de vida y muerte/ Stories of Life and Death. That writing came from workshops I taught in Cazucá, a slum south of Bogotá where many of the writers had been displaced by violence and rural poverty. The poems are raw, intimate, fearless, and some are by writers so young they had not even learned how to use a cliché yet.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
As an undergraduate, I took a Latin American literature...

10 Questions for Marie Goyette

November 13, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
The first piece I remember writing was a short story I wrote for school when I was about seven or eight. It was about a little girl (definitely me) who went on tropical vacation with her family (definitely my family) and, while on a boat ride, fell into the ocean and was rescued by a friendly dolphin (probably Flipper). The reason I remember writing this story was because my dad, also a lover of words and to whom I’d given the handwritten assignment to read, typed it up, inserted some ocean-themed clipart, and printed it on heavy, cream-colored paper. I remember his pride in my work, and then, seeing the care and time he invested to allow me to share my words with others, pride in my own work began to develop...

10 Questions for Simone Muench & Jackie White

September 23, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

The last spring shall come, the last summer, too,
so no to politicians peddling impotence, no

to preachers stitching our lips into eclipse, we want
the misfits, the women unafraid of descent,
—from "Self-Portrait Lined By Sándor Csoóri," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Jackie & Simone: For our new collection, The Under Hum, one of the first pieces we wrote was “Disclosure,” which developed into a sonnet, and one of our goals at the outset was to extend the feminist project of interrogating traditional (male) forms. Pointedly, then, we “turn” the argument of the poem at the end of the first quatrain with the...

10 Questions for Ifa Bayeza

September 9, 2024 - By Franchesca Viaud

In three interconnected plays, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of the epic of Emmett Till and the birth the modern Civil Rights Movement, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself, in his final days of life, as a specter during the trial of his killers and a shadowed presence in the aftermath.
—Excerpt from Ifa Bayeza's "The Till Trilogy," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not counting “Mahatma Gandhi, Man of Peace,” which I presented to my fourth grade class after discovering him in the World Book Encyclopedia and reading “What Negroes Can Learn from Gandhi” in LOOK magazine (I guess I might call that a...