interviews

Bruce Bond is the author of thirty-three books including Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), and Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023). Other honors include the Crab Orchard Book Prize, the Elixir Press Poetry Award, the Tampa Review Book Prize, the Lynda Hull Award, two TIL Best Book of Poetry awards, fellowships from the NEA and the Texas Institute for the Arts, and seven appearances in Best American Poetry. He teaches as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs jazz and classical guitar in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Chas Halpern has made a living writing marketing copy and writing & directing videos, mostly for global tech companies (Google, Oracle, Cisco, Intel). He is also a screenwriter. Awards include top honors at the international Script-to-Screen Festival. He also wrote a PBS documentary which was shown internationally. He has written for a Disney Channel series, and a dramatic comedy he wrote has been optioned and is currently in development. 

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of If You Leave Me, which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and is a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winner. Currently, she is the Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College and a contributing editor at Apogee Journal. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. Her second novel, The Stone Home, will be published in April 2024.

Dan Beachy-Quick is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Arrows (Tupelo Press, 2020) and new translations of Sappho, Wind—Mountain—Oak (Tupelo Press, 2023), and ancient Greek lyric poetry, Stone-Garland (Milkweed Editions, 2020). He is also the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations. He teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. Her novels include The Box, a Bustle Best Books of Fall 2023 selection, and Drafts of a Suicide Note, a Foreword INDIES literary-fiction finalist. She’s also the author of Listen, We All Bleed, a PEN/Galbraith-nominated essay collection, and Awabi, a duet of short stories, winner of the Digging Press Chapbook Award. Her work appears in Adroit, Arcturus, Black Warrior Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, Litro, and Necessary Fiction and has won recognition in the Best of the Net and Aeon Award competitions. 

Rachel Stone writes stories of hope and redemption, often set against vibrant Canadian backdrops. Her writing placed first in the 2022 OBOA Writing Contest and has appeared in international literary and visual arts magazines, journals and blogs. Rachel holds degrees in psychology and industrial relations. 

Rose Sutherland was born and raised a voracious reader of anything she could get her hands on in rural Nova Scotia. She has an overactive imagination, once fell off a roof trying to re-enact Anne of Green Gables, and has continued to be entertainingly foolhardy since, graduating theatre school in NYC, apprenticing at a pâtisserie in France, and moonlighting as an usher in Toronto. 

Tennison S. Black is the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Saries, UGA Press 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. Black received their MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net and are the editor of the anthology on contemporary disability, A Body You Talk To. Though Sonoran born, they reside in Washington State.