September 2022
Maxine Hong Kingston & the New Horizons of American Memoir
Richard Goodman
In the 1960s in America, there emerged the idea that the self—any self, including yourself—could be the subject of a book. Before that, writers who wrote books about themselves were almost inevitably famous, or notorious, or both.
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Let Scotland Burn Yella
Patrick Moran
On a New Year’s Eve gathering, after I had finished editing an anthology of contemporary Scottish Poetry, a learned friend admitted to me that he did not know a single Scottish poem.
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Raising the Volume
Aviya Kushner, Sharon Dolin, Katherine E. Young, Andrea Jurjevic, Nancy Naomi Carlson
The following five-part essay is adapted from the 2021 AWP panel “Raising the Volume: Women in Translation” which focused on how translators combat systemic exclusion in literary culture and amplify the voices of women and nonbinary authors.
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Bare Poetry
Jasmine V. Bailey
Poems without punctuation, if only making occasional appearances in literary journals, are nevertheless perennial staples of creative writing workshops, and are also often the bane of those workshops.
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Cathleen Schine & the Comic Tradition
Cathleen Schine
Cathleen Schine is the author of many novels, including They Do Not Mean To, But They Do (2016), Fin & Lady (2013), and The Three Weissmanns of Westport (2010, a rewriting of Sense and Sensibility) in the category of “middlebrow” literature and the idea of culture.
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On Arab Feminist Writers
Jasmin Attia
My mother and two aunts often lamented that in America, they couldn’t get their hands on fresh molokheya leaves. Sure, there was the Middle Eastern grocer who sold frozen packs of the viscous vegetable, but it wasn’t the same.
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A Poet of the World, For the World
Jonathan Harrington
"Poem making is ultimately a settling of accounts, the telling of a history, the marking of land, to say here I stepped and here I loved."
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