Interviews

Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named best book of the year at over a dozen outlets. Her work has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Hopwood Award, and the Massachusetts Book Award. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan) and has taught writing at the University of Michigan and Grub Street in Boston. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her and her work, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. Elissa holds an MFA from The University of Washington and currently serves as the undergraduate adviser for the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and a nonfiction faculty member in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is Saturday editor for The Rumpus.

Howard Axelrod's memoir, The Point of Vanishing, was named one of the best books of 2015 by Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and Entropy Magazine, and one of the best memoirs of 2015 by Library Journal. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, VQR, Shambhala Sun, Harvard Magazine, and The Boston Globe. He received the Michael C. Rockefeller fellowship from Harvard, and has been awarded residencies from the Blue Mountain Center, Ucross, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Axelrod has taught literature and writing at Harvard, University of Arizona, and Grub Street.

James Hannaham is the author of the novels Delicious Foods (Little, Brown 2015), a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2015, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and God Says No (McSweeney’s 2009), and has published stories in One Story, Fence, Story Quarterly, BOMB, and one in Gigantic for which he won a Pushcart Prize. He has exhibited text-based visual art at The Center for Emerging Visual Artists, 490 Atlantic, Kimberly-Klark Gallery, and James Cohan. He teaches in the Writing MFA program at the Pratt Institute.

Lori Ostlund’s novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a Ferro-Grumley Award finalist and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Her first book, a story collection entitled The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the 2009 California Book Award for First Fiction. Stories from it appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. 

Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Good on Paper (Melville House 2016) and A Highly Unlikely Scenario (Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her short stories have appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Fence, and Kenyon Review, and she has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is always at work on another book.

Samantha Hunt is the author of MR. SPLITFOOT, a ghost story. Her novel THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the Orange Prize. Her first book, THE SEAS, won a National Book Foundation award for writers under thirty-five. Hunt’s writing has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, McSweeney's, Tin House, New York Magazine, A Public Space, and a number of other fine publications. She lives in upstate New York and teaches at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Sandra Newman is the author of seven books, most recently a novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star, which was long-listed for the Folio Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Her other novels are The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done and Cake, and she is also the author of a memoir and three books of non-fiction, including How Not to Write a Novel (co-authored by Howard Mittelmark).

Sara Nović is the author of the novel Girl at War (Random House), now out in paperback. She studied fiction and translation at Columbia University, and now teaches writing at Wesleyan, Columbia, and with the literary nonprofit Words After War. She is the fiction editor for Blunderbuss Magazine and lives in Brooklyn.

Thomas Pierce was born and raised in South Carolina. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Oxford American, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program, he lives outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and children.