I’m not interested in likability with characters. I am drawn to characters who are complex, contradictory, and very particular in the ways that they might exist in the world, and that they are capable of holding contradictory views. That is how I see people.
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A Normal Interview with Éric Morales-Franceschini by Victoria Monsivaiz
My poetry is indeed heavily indebted to my studies in history, psychoanalysis, political economy, and critical social theory; but I find that, at times, only via poetry can I adequately express the gravity and intricacy of not just a given fact, but what I should (like to) do in light of that fact.
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The Velvet Air of Gaza: A Conversation with Three Palestinian Writers
I still think it is essential to at least sometimes focus on aspects of Palestinian culture and heritage outside of the conflict with Zionists. Doing this shows that we are not only defined by the current suffering and brutality; it is definitely part of the Palestinian experience, but it is not all of it.
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A Normal Interview with Myriam Gurba by Monique Quintana
A Gothic style is ideal for narrating the conquest of the West because it’s a horror story that continues to unfold. Horror tropes that have their roots in the Gothic are ideal mechanisms for that type of narrative.
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A Normal Interview with Ghassan Zeineddine by Lena Mubsutina
I have always loved creating different kinds of characters from various generations, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic classes. I think it’s just a matter of doing those characters justice and treating them with empathy and compassion.
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A Normal Interview with Béatrice Szymkowiak by sami h. tripp
"I think art holds the power to shift and multiply perspectives, which the world desperately needs right now. Single-mindedness is dangerous. What I love about poetry in particular, is its capacity of subversion, of dissent, against ideas but also against language itself, as language and ideas are intertwined."
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A Normal Interview with Allegra Hyde by Mialise Carney
I think artists and writers are really important in terms of addressing the climate crisis. Everybody, ultimately, is important—it’s an all hands on deck kind of situation—but artists and writers have the ability to make sense of a problem that otherwise seems vast and intangible.
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A Normal Interview with KB Brookins by James O’Bannon
Rage is a thing that has to be birthed, because we do so much course correction – or at least my experience has felt like, at multiple times, someone has done something anti-Black to me, someone has done something racist, homophobic, transphobic, and I feel, in that moment, I can’t react the way that I want to.
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A Normal Interview with Maya Pindyck by Caleigh Camara
"I think we grapple with those stories we cannot reconcile by writing them again and again, maybe each time with different 'others' in mind, and for a future people we hope to touch."
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A Normal Interview with MariNaomi by Lee Lee
My first pieces were our letters and notes to each other, our photographs, and the boxes full of journals I read through, one by one. Once I put it all together, it felt significant. As I collected them, it felt like a scavenger hunt.
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A Normal Interview with Will Betke-Brunswick by Sydney Allison Hinton
"People expect mammals to smile and frown, to have expressive eyebrows, and to make certain gestures with their hands, arms, and front legs. Drawing flightless birds frees me from so many expectations and gives me more space to play."
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A Normal Interview with Katie Ives By Rosie Bates
Climbing can be an enticing pursuit for writing because a climb is a natural story… Basically, anytime you go on a climb, even if it’s just a backyard climb, you’re tracing a narrative or the form of a narrative arc with your hands and your feet.
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A Normal Interview with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri by Samina Najmi
I have always come to both reading and writing from a somewhat genderless space. What I mean is that both writing and reading have been mechanisms for me to try on different lives and experiences.
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A Normal Interview with Manuel Muñoz by Manuel Farias
"What we think is a really small, isolated place turns out to be the center of somebody else’s world."
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A Normal Interview with Andrés Cerpa by Rebeca Abidail Flores
Constructing the book is a device for me as a writer to enter it more fully. I like to drop myself in. If I’m there mid-sentence, mid-story, if everything is kind of jumbled, then maybe I can catch the momentum that I had previously and continue on riffing.
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A Normal Interview with Jubi Arriola-Headley by Arielle K. Jones
Kink has a more expansive meaning. … Kink as just that, sexual kinkiness. Kink as, the kink in Black folks’ hair. Kink as, a kink in the system. Kink as in, broke. So, I play off all the different ways that kink is a thing that we think about.
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A Normal Interview with Monica Sok by Mariah Bosch
I write down dreams as they tell themselves to me. I write down as much as I can remember, trying to get the details and the order of events right––not interpreting them but documenting them. But I think there’s a little bit of freedom in figuring out how a dream takes shape on the page.
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A Normal Interview with Khaty Xiong by Jer Xiong
A lot of things have changed me as a poet since 2015, but what these changes have ultimately revealed is that I cannot live without poetry. I need it to commune with the living, to commune with the dead, and to meet the many burdens of grief that come with being alive.
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A Normal Interview with torrin a. greathouse, by Angel Gonzales
I often know — or think I know — that I have found the right language for relating an experience when the act of speaking a poem out loud makes me shake.
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Black. Wild. Laughing. Revisiting Danez Smith’s Homie and Reading at Fresno State by Angel Gonzales
Smith is writing from the margins, not about them, centering on all the things that are often denied, like love, tenderness, pain, friendship, and most importantly, joy. But there is no way around it, as Smith says when speaking about their process for self-care after writing about Black trauma.
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