interviews

Alice Wong (she/her) is a disabled activist, media maker, and consultant. She is the Founder and Director of the Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing and amplifying disability media and culture created in 2014. Currently, Alice is the editor of Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century, an anthology of essays by disabled people, available now by Vintage Books (2020).

Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, and a visual artist. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, Narratively, Literary Hub, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Vestoj, among others. She is the author of Certain and Impossible Events, which was selected by Cheryl Strayed as the winner of a Kore Press Memoir Award and will be published in January 2021. She holds an MFA from Portland State University and lives in Pittsburgh with her husband, writer Patrick McGinty, and their son. Photo by Porter Loves Photography.

Danielle Evans received the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, as well as the Paterson Prize for Fiction with the publication of her story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Evans's work has appeared in numerous magazines including The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, and Callaloo, amongst others. After earning her MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Evans now teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her newest collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.

Lauren Sandler is an award-winning journalist and the author of This Is All I Got: A New Mother’s Search for Home, as well as two other books. Her essays and features have appeared in Time, The New York Times, Slate, The Atlantic, and Elle, amongst others. Lauren has taught in the graduate journalism program at NYU, and was a regular commentator for the BBC. She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and a resident at the Maison Dora Maar in Menerbes, France.

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. Marcom is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.

Thomas Belton is an author with extensive publications in fiction, non-fiction, magazine feature writing, science writing, and journalism. His publications include his professional memoir, Protecting New Jersey’s Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State, his most recent short story, “The Murderous Wood,” and his short story, “Murder at the Trocadero.” He has also published short stories in Cicada and Art News. He has numerous publications in the scientific literature and as an Op-Ed writer for The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.