Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

How can a novel set during one brief moment near the end of Herman Melville’s father’s life, a moment lost to history and now fully overshadowed by his son’s enduring literary legacy, become a portal to discuss the world entire? Melvill is a novel about reading and writing, about parenthood and legacy, about madness an

What does it mean that a life can not only be animated by books but destroyed by them? That a self can be not only made by reading, but unmade by it? Dionne Brand’s latest book of nonfiction Salvage: Readings from the Wreck returns to formative texts from her own reading life in order to model […] The post Dionne Brand

Danez Smith’s poetry is so many things, a poetry of resistance, of elegy, of joy, of care, of repair. Their poetry is Afrofuturist and Afropessimist. It’s nature poetry, decolonial poetry, queer poetry, a poetry that is archival and documentary. And it is also a poetry that questions poetry itself and even more so, que

Today’s conversation with Kenzie Allen, about her debut poetry collection Cloud Missives, is unusually wide-ranging. We look at the influence of archaeology, anthropology and cartography on her poetry, and on her notion of gaze within her work. We explore the fraught colonial history of these fields, and how, as an ind

Today’s craft talk—by Torrey Peters on “Strategic Opacity”— was recorded at the 2024 Tin House summer writers workshop. Peters explores the elements in works of fiction that actually don’t make sense—from William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante —and how, paradoxically, it is these very elements, the unexplainable ones, t

As part of Jewish Currents Live: A Day of Politics & Culture, I moderated a conversation between Adania Shibli and Dionne Brand this September in New York City. Both Dionne and Adania have been on the show individually, and part of why I was hoping to bring them together this way was because of just […] The post Jewish