The Painted Forest (West Virginia University Press, October), a debut collection of essays investigating the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from; a lyrical excavation of rural Wisconsin, tourist towns, and the “under-imagined and over

Feedback from readers Back in the day, I used to subscribe to a teen magazine, and when it came I would hug it to my chest, run inside, and read it cover to cover. Now, as a grown-up writer, I do the same with Poets & Writers Magazine. The July/Augus

The Yellow House (Grove Press, August), a debut memoir about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a neglected New Orleans neighborhood where the author grew up with eleven siblings; a multigenerational examination of place, class, race, ine

On the northern coast of the Hawai’ian island Maui, off a road leading down to the cliffs above the shore, a lush forest grows. Mango trees covered in vines stand next to palms as tall as eighty feet, while heliconia and hibiscus grow far beneath the

Ordinary Girls (Algonquin Books, October), a debut memoir examining the author’s childhood as a runaway, juvenile delinquent, and high school dropout who finds love and family; a fierce, unflinching account of ordinary girls leading extraordinary liv

In 1994 Joanne Gabbin, an English professor at James Madison University (JMU), organized a conference to celebrate Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks and African American poetics. Hundreds of people came out to hear Brooks and more than thi

BEN George’s arrival in big publishing was more of a vault than a climb, and it surprised him as much as anybody. “Being a New York editor,” he says, “was never something I was aiming toward.” Remarkably, what brought George’s editorial acumen to the

As the founding editor of the Cincinnati Review, Nicola Mason has a strong track record of spotting talented writers early in their careers. Under her leadership the review published the early work of fiction writers Caitlin Horrocks and Jamie Quatro

One of the tried-and-true pieces of advice dispensed to the hundreds of writers applying to MFA programs each year goes something like this: “Talk to current or former students.” While this remains a valuable tip—who better to tell you what a certain

IN CHILDREN OF GRASS: A PORTRAIT OF AMERICAN POETRY, PUBLISHED BY SCHAFFNER PRESS IN SEPTEMBER, PHOTOGRAPHER B. A. VAN SISE PRESENTS SELECTIONS FROM AN EXPANSIVE, THREE-YEAR POETRY PORTRAITURE PROJECT FOR WHICH HE ASKED POETS ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO PO

EARLIER this year novelists Christina Baker Kline and Lisa Gornick had a conversation at the Mid-Manhattan branch of the New York Public Library about the challenges of writing fiction set in earlier times. Gornick had just published her fourth work

YOU know the beginning: In October 2017, a major newspaper broke a story about a famous producer—a serial predator, a man who wears his ugly on his skin—and our communal ether filled with women’s voices sharing private horrors, amplifying and echoing

THERE is no precise method for writing a compelling work of fiction, of course, but author Téa Obreht does have one question she tries to answer for herself during the process. “What is the difference between the truth and what the characters are tel

Once More We Saw Stars (Knopf, May), a debut memoir exploring the fifteen months between the accidental death of the author’s two-year-old daughter and the birth of his son; a meditation on the universal truths of how we find meaning, beauty, and spi

This past spring Poets & Writers launched United States of Writing, an initiative to expand its core programs to better serve writers coast to coast, especially writers of color and other historically marginalized groups. With generous support from t