interviews

A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Alexander Maksik is the author of three novels: YOU DESERVE NOTHING, A New York Times bestseller; A MARKER TO MEASURE DRIFT, a New York Times Notable Book of 2013; and, most recently, SHELTER IN PLACE, named one of the best books of the year by The Guardian and The San Francisco Chronicle. Maksik’s writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s, Tin House, The Sewanee Review, Harvard Review, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Photo by Martina Bacigalupo. 

Catherine Pierce's most recent book of poems is The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016). She is also the author of The Girls of Peculiar (Saturnalia 2012) and Famous Last Words (Saturnalia 2008). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, FIELD, and elsewhere. She co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. 

A singer-songwriter and poet from Atascadero, California, Ephraim Scott Sommers is the author of The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (Tebot Bach 2017). Having received his PhD from Western Michigan University, he currently teaches on the Graduate Creative Writing Faculty at the University of Central Florida.

Helen Ellis is an American novelist. She is the author of two published novels, as well as several works of short fiction. Her first novel, Eating the Cheshire Cat, is a dark comedy written in Southern Gothic fiction style. It tells the story of three girls raised in the South, and the odd, sometimes macabre tribulations they endure.

Jenny Irish lives in Tempe, Arizona, where she is grateful to serve as the Assistant Director of the Creative Program at Arizona State University. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Catapult, Colorado Review, Epoch, and The Georgia Review.

Lauren Grodstein is the author of four novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Friend of the Family and the Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything. Her latest novel, Our Short History, was published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in March, 2017. Lauren’s work has been translated into French, Turkish, German, Hebrew, and other languages, and her essays and reviews have been widely published.  She directs the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in New Jersey with her husband, son, and dog.

Paisley Rekdal is an American poet whose work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), and Narrative's Poetry Prize. She grew up in Seattle and graduated from the universities of Washington, Toronto, and Michigan. In May of 2017, she was named Utah’s Poet Laureate. She is the guest editor for Best American Poetry 2020, and her newest work, Appropriate: A Provocation, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Peter Ho Davies is a contemporary British writer of Welsh and Chinese descent. Born and raised in Coventry, Davies studied physics at Manchester University and then English at Cambridge University.

Ross Gay is an American poet and professor.

Sunil Yapa is a Sri Lankan American fiction writer and novelist. Yapa won the 2010 Hyphen Asian American Short Story Contest for his short story, Pilgrims, which was also published in the Fall 2010 issue of Hyphen, Issue No. 21, the "New Legacy Issue." His debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist was released on January 12, 2016 by Lee Boudreaux Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is the author of Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications 2016), a 2016-2017 Steinbeck Fellow, former Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange winner and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grantee. She’s received residencies from Hedgebrook and Ragdale Foundation and is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. Her work is published in Acentos Review, CALYX, crazyhorse, and The James Franco Review. A short dramatization of her poem Our Lady of the Water Gallons, directed by Jesús Salvador Treviño, can be viewed at latinopia.com. She is a cofounder of Women Who Submit and the curator of HITCHED.