A Conversation with Poet · Composer · Editor · Educator MALIK AMEER CRUMPLER

My creative process always starts with automatic writing or recorded improvisations. I listen back, read over, and then craft those into final projects. By “craft,” I mean revise and find more unique, effective ways of showing details or elaborating stories—building complexity through addition and subtraction. In the case of my current AI collaborations, there’s very little revision. We want to maintain a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. I set time limits for each interaction, prompting the AI until I feel it can begin prompting itself. Then I just conduct the direction of the focal points, encouraging them to go further.

For human collaborations, like my recent project with Bastien Keb, he sent me rough drafts. I wrote poems to them, sometimes recorded improvisations, and then revised my performance to coalesce with the music. If his rough draft didn’t fully express what I imagined, I’d listen to Ravel or Gil Evans & Miles Davis to influence my word choice and delivery. After writing to something like Sketches of Spain or Boléro, I’d return to his drafts and adjust my delivery to sync better with his work. It became a time-traveling process, with all four of those voices—mine, his, Ravel’s, Gil’s—contributing to the generation of words.

A Conversation with Author MATTHEW JAMES JONES

I was the kid who hid in books. Nestled on a window sill, the sun made the red curtain glow pink - no one could find me. Only the yelling would cut through, or my brother's hand would find my ankle for more lessons of the fist. I skipped a grade and discovered loneliness, escaped deeper into stories of dragons and wizards and dragon-wizards. One night, Mom woke me up and pushed a book in my hands. "Read so loud your Dad can hear you," she said. He waited with bloody knuckles in the hall, so my little voice went up. I'm not sure if I fell in love with reading that day, but we needed a shield.

Author CHRISTINA BERKE on Memory and Imagination

It was important to my father that I learned to type. After school, I looked forward to clacking out short stories and reading them aloud, sometimes acting them out. He was always teaching me about the world; an atlas by his bedside, a world map in the kitchen, the news radio on all the time. It gave me an expansive outlook on the world; that writing could be a way to reach far corners. It also planted seeds about time travel and the infinite universe and astrophysics, parallel universes, what happens when a body dies, memory, and time.

A Conversation with Author KAREN POWELL

Fifteen Wild Decembers is a reimagining of the life of Emily Brontë, so my first step was to return to Emily’s one extraordinary novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and to become more familiar with her poetry. The latter was particularly useful when it came to finding Emily’s voice. I also reread the novels written by her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, and then immersed myself in all the work that has been carried over the years by various biographers and historians. When researching any famous person, a lot of the hard work has already been done for you. Still, it’s important to approach that work with a rigorous eye, and in the knowledge that even the most consciously objective history can only ever be one person’s interpretation of events. As a novelist, there also comes a time when your imagination wants to work its way into the intriguing spaces between the facts, seeking the stories as yet untold.

A Conversation with Author CHRISTINA COOKE

I was born on the island of Jamaica. My early upbringing there was foundational to my creative obsessions and narrative imagination. Jamaican characters and language and cultural inflections are ever-present in my work—even if I don’t intend them to, even if they never take center stage. “Jamaican” is the first among the many hyphenations that make up my geopolitical identity. This is intentional. “Jamaican” is the bedrock of all that I am. Historical research and critical inquiry are two key tenets of how I approach writing. I am primarily a writer of realist, literary fiction—a genre that often finds greater resonance and meaning through expansive research. Engaging with historical collections helps me identify all the poignant details that will make the story’s setting and circumstances seem recognizably “real”, whereas critical inquiry helps me in adding nuance to the themes and ideas the story explores. Basically, research is the scaffolding that gives shape to my stories, ensuring forward movement, cohesion, and relevance.

A Conversation with Author KAT TANG

I was born in Hangzhou, China, moved to Sendai, Japan when I was young, and then settled (though I use the word settled lightly because we moved 3 more times) in the Bay Area. The constant moving meant that I had to learn how to navigate different cultures and languages from a young age. Maybe this is why I've never really been interested in taking part in the predominant culture, because to me it has always shifted. The humanities are how we hold a mirror up to ourselves and examine the best and worst that we have to offer. How we sort through all that to create the art worth sharing is fascinating.

A Conversation with Author MICHAEL IDOV

The Collaborators started with the main character, Ari Falk, and with identifying my own wants as a reader. I remember watching some iteration of Jack Ryan when something struck me here’s an iconic character who’s been played by some of the most iconic actors in Hollywood, and I don’t know what his favorite band or movie is. And I thought of this as a challenge. I wanted to create a spy character in his thirties, with relatable millennial interests, perspectives, and a healthy skepticism about what his organization does. I also wanted the book to be exciting but authentic in its settings. Since I myself am not a spy, this meant tapping into my own peripatetic life: my time in Latvia, Portugal, Berlin, Moscow, New York, Thailand. As a result, my first "genre" novel ended up being my most autobiographical.

The Radical Poetics of NOAH DAVID ROBERTS

In the modern political landscape, I think art is the most powerful mechanism. How else to explore living? How else to conceptualize alternatives to the systems that oppress so many? How else to experience other perspectives, some that might possibly be diametric to those of the viewer / reader? I believe, as corny as it sounds, that good art changes minds. Good art evokes a feeling, a relation, a recoil. Poetry, I think, is extremely important right now. I believe fully that the syntax of our day-to-day language perpetuates these systems of oppression. We must break through. Thoughts burst at the seams of our communication tools. It is impossible to relate a true, full queer experience through a poem without breaking some rules to burst from that box a hopeful individual self-created; impossible to relate a queer story with heteronormative language & language structures. I think about this a lot. In a world overcome with fascism, to express queerness through art is to create one's own singular way of expression. This is a revolutionary act. Queerness is hyperpersonal. Poetry is hyperpersonal, as is all writing. It's vulnerable & cannot be taken away from us.

A Conversation with Author OLUFUNKE GRACE BANKOLE

The movement between worlds—Nigeria and the US, Ifa and Christianity, inner longing and cultural constraint—is the dynamic upon which I have based my storytelling in The Edge of Water, and the one with which I have always been familiar. Three weeks after I was born in Maryland, my parents took me to Ibadan, our ancestral home, where I lived for eight years, before returning again to the US. Throughout my childhood, I was Nigerian at home—steeped in traditional Yoruba culture; American and spiritually wandering outside of it. I wanted to be a doctor to make my African mother proud, though somewhere in my core, I was lured by the transformational power of words. Fluidity between clashing desires has been foundational to my work.

A Conversation with Poet · Translator · Editor MIRIAM CALLEJA

I was born and spent 40 years on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean. I grew up bilingual and am now trilingual, speaking Maltese, English, and Italian. Malta is steeped in history, surrounded by the sea - an entity which is beautiful and scary in equal measures. My dreamscapes, even after living in the US for more than 3 years, often involve the sea and underground spaces.

as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky
A Conversation with Author NANA EKUA BREW-HAMMOND

I was born in Plattsburgh, NY, and raised mostly in Queens, NY, until, at twelve years old, my parents sent me to live and school in Ghana. That changed everything for me. Abruptly, my world expanded--exploded, really. Not in the sense that it was destroyed--though, it kinda was--but it got SO big so fast that I had to become new, and so I did. In Ghana, I lived with my maternal grandmother, a born-again Christian. Our days started with Morning Devotion, and were woven throughout with prayer. Through worship songs, she taught me the Twi and Fante I had willfully eschewed in America, plus Ga, translating lyrics for me line by line. When my great-grandmother came to live with us, I learned the little Ewe I still have now, both of us determined to decode the sounds that came out of our mouths.

A Conversation with Author FABIENNE JOSAPHAT

I was born and raised in Haiti and it has shaped my identity greatly. I write works that seek to challenge the current perceptions of Haiti, but I also explore themes of migration, identity, consciousness, which means everything I write leans toward opening my readers' eyes. I always think of the world in its entirety, so I'm interested in sharing stories that take us deeper into the human experience beyond borders. Growing up in Haiti, I read a lot of Haitian literature, but also European and African writings in addition to American writing. I think this has colored my perspective in ways that are exciting and I want to keep sharing these experiences in my work.

A Conversation with Author CHRISTIAN TERESI

It was generous and talented teachers who introduced me to Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams. It was teachers who made me read Hamlet and King Lear. So, when I consider how Albany, New York influenced my thinking about the world, I think about how important well-funded public schools are to creating an informed populace. I think how K-12 teachers are not paid nearly enough and how they make real sacrifices to do that virtuous work. I wonder why the significant benefits of a quality K-12 public education are not available to everyone in the United States.

A Conversation with Author ALISHA DIETZMAN

I think of myself as Southern-adjacent and Czech-adjacent. I don’t really feel American in the truest sense. In terms of influence, this is a multifaceted question for me, but certainly one I’ve considered; the harder it is to answer the question “where are you from?” the more you tend to consider the subject/self formed in that confusion. I think the loneliness of existing comfortably in neither culture—or uncomfortably in both—has impacted my writing more than closeness, or intimacy with either culture, though I love both deeply. (And maybe its easiest to see them clearly from a slight distance, and this might be true, generally.) I definitely sense an undercurrent of alienation in my writing, but I don’t mind that, and increasingly, I heighten and interrogate this alienation, subtly. The strangeness of being outside isn’t always a bad strangeness.

A Conversation with Poet TIM RICH

A poem may have begun sub-consciously years back, but it can emerge at any time of day. I stop whatever I’m doing and get down as much of that first shape as possible—words, phrases, anything that’s arrived. It’s like stopping mid-walk to photograph a butterfly. A poem often begins for me with a phrase that opens up into an idea, atmosphere, or story. I revisit my rough notes soon after, adding depth and form, shaping lines. Usually, by the next evening, I’ll sit with those lines and push at their structure, trying to figure out what I’m really saying. I’m a better editor than writer, so a draft generally takes off once I start to work and work and work and work it. It’s rare that I do fewer than 50 edits of a poem.

JOAQUÍN ZIHUATANEJO on Language, Lineage & Resistance

My tío Tino, used to tell me when I was a mocoso, “Mi’jo, if you ever make something of yourself, make sure you tell them you were born on the mean streets of East Dallas, because your mom was in the back seat and we were flying up Gaston Ave toward Baylor Hospital and you we’re…happening back there.” A story…and I understand what the word story implies, but I love that story. So much. I’m from East Dallas. I’m from the streets of my city. My first poems sound like the streets of my city. My early poems sound like el jardín de mi abuelo…my grandfather’s garden. They sound like stories bouncing off the walls of Roy Hernandez’s Barbershop over off Henderson Ave. They sound like laughter in the produce aisle of Jerry’s Super Mercado. When I heard Jonathan GNO White’s poem, “Street Poet,” and the opening line…”I am a street poet / and I write about bad things,” I knew that’s what kind of poet I am…I am a street poet.

A Conversation with Author MICHAEL FARRIS SMITH

I work without a net, discovering as I go. My typical day is go into my studio around nine in the morning and go right to it. When I'm going good on something, I have a goal of 1,000 words a day. Sometimes that comes in a lightning bolt and sometimes it comes in a grind, but when I get there, I stop. No matter if I know what's next. I like to keep the fire lit for the next day. I'll make myself a couple of notes for where to start tomorrow, and that's pretty much it. I'll reread what I wrote the day before (not the entire manuscript) to get the words flowing and then I'll begin. It's a process that has gotten me through eight novels and I can't see a reason to change. There is an impulse to it, a notion of discovery to it. Sometimes it causes some desperation, but that fuels itself into the story (hopefully). I just believe that if I'm feeling that sense of discovery along the way, that the reader will also feel it when the time comes.

Poet SAÚL HERNÁNDEZ ON Lineage, Language & Power

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process allows me to connect deeply with others. I believe our stories—no matter how different—carry the potential to resonate across boundaries. For me, storytelling is not just personal; it’s communal. Sharing my experiences is essential, especially because I rarely saw myself reflected in the narratives I encountered growing up. It wasn’t until my undergraduate studies that I finally read stories that spoke to my own identity and upbringing. This absence raises a critical question: if we grow up in a world where only certain stories are told, are we truly being inclusive, or are we simply reinforcing the narratives society has deemed worthy? As both an educator and a writer, I am committed to challenging that imbalance. I work to ensure that all voices—especially those often overlooked—are heard, valued, and given space to thrive.

A Conversation with Author ROB MCLENNAN

Exploring literature, the arts, and the creative process connects me to empathy, experience and deeper human comprehension. It connects me to better thinking. I was born in Ottawa, but raised on a dairy farm in Eastern Ontario. Growing up on a farm provided an example of community thinking everyone helped each other, whether assisting with harvest, plowing driveways in the winter or repairing machinery. Everyone helps each other, and this is how I've always approached literary activity, whether writing, organizing events or publishing, working hard to participate in an ecosystem far more expansive than purely my own, individual work.

A Conversation with Author · Lawyer KRISTIN KOVAL

I had a long-standing desire to write about forgiveness because I’ve had powerful experiences with forgiveness, both being forgiven and forgiving others. I used to think of forgiveness as a gift a wronged person gave to wrongdoer, but I’ve realized that when I’m able to forgive someone, it’s a gift that’s given to me, not from me. There’s an old saying—sometimes attributed to Buddha, sometimes to Nelson Mandela—that holding onto anger or resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, and I think it’s accurate. Forgiving a wrongdoer, while complicated, can have an incredible and lasting impact on the person doing the forgiving, and I wanted to write about that experience—essentially, the gift the wronged person receives—in a way that might inspire others to re-think forgiveness. I struggled with how to do so until I realized the story of a family in crisis after a fratricide would enable me to highlight how complicated forgiveness can be, yet how rewarding, because a fratricide put the parents in both the hardest and the easiest position possible to forgive.