Blog / Interviews

8 Questions for Jia Sung

March 18, 2019 - By Emily Wojcik

Tell us about one of the first pieces you created.
As a child I loved making drawings of foxes and animals. We had this series of nonfiction books for kids, Eyewitness Books, and I would sit down and copy the art in them.

What artist(s) or works have influenced the way you work now?
Some of my favorite artists right now are Maria Berrio, Belkis Ayón, Catalina Ouyang. Many of my aesthetic references pull from Chinese ink painting and Japanese print traditions, medieval art, Himalayan religious art, Mughal miniatures… I love the use of flat space, the rich universe suggested in every composition.

What other professions have you worked in?
Publishing, education, artist assistant. Currently I am...

10 Questions for Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

March 15, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

He remembers having to kneel on a chair and brace
one hand against the kitchen table to steady himself,
the other dipping into the aquarium.
—from “Opening the Palm”, Winter 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 4)
 

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of my earliest poems was about a dog named Bosco who visited residents in local nursing homes. I can still recall Bosco, with his golden fur and red-and-white bandana.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
There are too many to name. So much praise must go to the poets Ai, Aimee Nezhukumathil, Don Mee Choi, Sun Yung Shin, and E.J. Koh, in whose work I continue to recognize wild possibilities for poetry. Ron...

10 Questions for Raena Shirali

March 13, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

               Up here, you’re just flecks
in the emerald. Which I’d never say
to hurt you. I’m saying a hundred bodies
running through a field chasing one
wind-whipped mustard sari—
—from “the mountains speak to the village”, Winter 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 4)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
One of the oldest poems in GILT, “The Downing,” comes from an undergraduate poetry course I took with the extraordinary poet and educator Emily Rosko. One of poem’s craft approaches is anaphora, a tool I...

10 Questions for W. Todd Kaneko

March 8, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

I am afraid that all my ancestors
have gathered my words like birds

collect hair from the dead
for nesting, an abundance of silence,

whole spools of it ready to tether
me to the trees.
—from “Minidoka Was a Concentration Camp in Idaho”, Winter 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 4)
 

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I began writing as a fiction writer, so most of my early work is prose. I was infatuated with form and was always trying to write something that was formally adventurous. Like, I wrote a story in flash-forwards because I wanted to experiment with exposition and time. I wrote a story that spanned a whole decade because I wanted to play with lists and compression. Eventually, I...

10 Questions for Matt Huynh

March 4, 2019 - By Abby MacGregor

You know what we used to do? When we had a questions that we couldn't answer? We carved them into bones. To ask the king. Will we be visited by sickness? Will we be visited by disaster? By harm? By evil?—From "Oracle Bones," Winter 2018 (Vol. 59, Issue 4)

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
It was a surrealist adventure comic, because I didn’t see that available on comic book shelves and it was what I wanted to read. It may seem quite disconnected from the work I make now, but it was the first step in a pattern of creating work that I felt was underrepresented and that begun for an audience of one. Quickly, my work shifted to answering that same prompt by creating comics about my immediate migrant community, my...