Danilo John Thomas’s story collection, Ore Vein, (Veliz Press) reminds me of a lenticular—one of those weird grooved pictures that shifts images—and I’m a kid jumping from one side of the room to another, watching the flowers bloom then wilt, or the skeleton grow flesh.

The shared terrain, in place and theme, gave Toor and I a lot to talk about in a recent conversation that took place online, including the idea of representation in fiction, coming-of-age narratives, and more.

Claire Jiménez is the author of two full-length works of fiction, the short story collection Staten Island Stories (John Hopkins University Press, 2019), the novel What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez (Grand Central Publishing, 2023). Staten Island Stories features twelve short stories which follow the lives of Staten Islanders living in hostile environments and economically uncomfortable…

I had the pleasure of meeting Tayyba Kanwal almost two summers ago in an online workshop on poetic forms led by Jai Chakrabarti and hosted by A Public Space. When the class ended, several of us wanted to keep the energy going. We’ve continued to meet over Zoom from our separate corners of the United…

Nina Sudhakar’s debut short story collection Where to Carry the Sound, Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize from University of North Texas Press, defies categorization. Making use of charts, lists, myths, and ranging from fables to folktales to oral histories to realism, the nine stories in Sudhakar’s collection depict women who find themselves in…

Milo Todd‘s novel, The Lilac People (Counterpoint Press), a national best-seller, was named a Stonewall Honor Book and an American Library Association Notable Book. The Lilac People is the story of a trans man and his girlfriend who are ripped from their best lives by the ascent of Hitler, the Holocaust, and the subsequent liberation by the Allies…

If you’re a fan of short fiction and flash fiction, there’s a good chance you’ve read one of Yasmina Din Madden’s gorgeous, funny, harrowing stories. For years, I have been eagerly waiting for Yasmina’s debut collection You Know Nothing (Curbstone Press).  Yasmina and I first met at my first-ever AWP in Washington DC in 2017;…

There’s no requirement to read Nadia Staikos’s debut novel Until They Sleep (Guernica Editions) when you yourself are sleepless, but that’s what happened to me, opening the book in the middle of the night and instantly falling into its world. The writing is lush and lively, sending readers to a remote village in Greece full…

Miriam Gershow’s new novel, Closer (Regal House Publishing, June 2025) tracks the fallout from a racially charged incident at an Oregon high school. As students, teachers, counselors and families relate their experience of the consequences of racial intimidation, friendships and loyalties splinter and regroup, marriages fray, and more tragedy looms. The plot is fast paced…

Tom Comitta is that rare thing: an experimental writer whose experiments have been worth the effort. Call it collage, assemblage, found text, or literary supercut, Comitta’s last major work, The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023), wasn’t just the meeting point for hundreds of other authors’ sentences (though that it was) but an astonishingly seamless…

Joyce Hinnefeld and Gene Garber met in another century, when Hinnefeld was an English/Creative Writing Ph.D. student at the University at Albany. She took Garber’s fiction workshop along with an independent study on narrative theory, and when it was time to find a advisor for her dissertation, a novel, she mustered the courage to ask…

Hayden Casey’s first book, Show Me Where the Hurt Is (Split/Lip Press), opens with a quotation from Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband: “A wound gives off its own light/ surgeons say/ If all the lamps in this house were turned out/ you could dress this wound/ by what shines from it.” In the…