Interview by Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li This year’s 2021 Jacob Zilber Prize winners‘ stories, chosen by contest judge Téa Mutonji, explore themes of sexuality, identity, branding, desire, and connection. Their words are luminous—reflecting and challenging society’s profit off time,...
There is grimness and there is vitality in Tell the Birds Your Body is Not a Gun. Rayanne Haines engages with pain and scars, but is also familiar with warmth and tenderness, in her rendition of the personal and social—she...
Interview by Shereen Lee “This is a holy text,” Kaveh Akbar pronounces at the opening of his new collection, Pilgrim Bell. But his persona is unsure of how to write a text befitting holiness, or what it even means...
Interview by Bruce Geddes Radium Girl is Sofi Papamarko’s debut collection of short stories, exploring themes of loneliness and alienation, and women reclaiming their power. What follows is a conversation between Sofi and Bruce Geddes about vengeance, flawed characters,...
Interview by Uche Umezurike Teardrops on the Weser (2021) consists of poems elegantly crafted by practiced fingers, poems as luminous as they are liquid. Water imagery ripples through the rhythm of the poems, charting the poet’s itineraries far and wide. Migration,...
Interview by Uche Umezurike In Where the Baedeker Leads, James Yékú explores in language precise and mellifluous the particulars of longing and love, home and diaspora. He takes the reader along routes of memory and immediacy, traversing time and...
Interview by David Ly Tolu Oloruntoba’s debut poetry collection, The Junta of Happenstance, is a journey through syncopated language to peel back his own interpretation of the (im)migrant experience, struggles against social injustices, and his time as a physician....
Interview by Jesse Holth Allie McFarland’s debut novel, Disappearing in Reverse (University of Calgary Press, 2020), features an unnamed narrator as the main character—a picara who is on a journey of grief, discovery, humour, and burgeoning adulthood. Jesse Holth:...
Interview by Uche Umezurike KB’s poetry shimmers with a playfulness that veils the scars and struggles of a poet who refuses to be defined by the politics of propriety and respectability. Each poem raises a fist against gender binary, emphasizes...