Interviews

Interview with Chard deNiord

“I didn’t start out with any clear intention of doing a book of interviews. When I was the program director at the New England College MFA program, I interviewed a few poets who were connected to the program. Jack Gilbert and Gerald Stern were my first two subjects.”

An Interview with Robert Mezey

In whatever formal more he has worked, from free verse to the most limited schematic patterns, Mezey has always revealed a mastery of the relation between deep and surface rhythms of language and thought, and an unyielding poetic integrity that is itself like a beacon against a darkening literary horizon.—JohnHollander

An interview with Robert Mezey by Laura Hoopes

Interview with Poet Anastassia Afanasyeva

Anastasia Afanasyeva is generally known as the most interesting poet of her generation writing in Russian language outside the borders of Russia in our time. She is also a prolific literary translator of various works form Ukrainian and English. In 2003 her collection of poetry To Those Who Live There was shortlisted for the Debut Prize.

Interview with Fady Joudah

Joudah’s debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and was a finalist for ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award. Joudah translated the final three collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s work in The Butterfly’s Burden (2006), which was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Interview with Mindy Zhang

Ming Di (penname for Mindy Zhang) is a Chinese poet and translator living in the United States. She is co-founder and editor of Poetry East West, a Chinese-English bilingual literary magazine published in Los Angeles and Beijing.

Valzhyna Mort Interview

“Born in Minsk, Belarus (part of the former Soviet Union), in 1981, Valzhyna Mort has been praised as ‘[a] risen star of the international poetry world’ by the Irish Times. When she moved to the United States in 2005, she had already published her first book, I’m as Thin as Your Eyelashes, and was known across the …

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M.A. Vizsolyi Interview

M.A. Vizsolyi’s first book of poems, “The Lamp with Wings,” was a winner of the National Poetry Series, and has just been released.  His poems have recently appeared or are scheduled to appear in the journals Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, Poetry International and Epiphany.  He teaches ice hockey and ice skating lessons in Central Park, and lives in Brooklyn with …

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Ishion Hutchinson Interview

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica.  He attended the University of the West Indies, Mona, New York University, and received his PhD from the University of Utah.  Peepal Tree Press (UK) published his first book, Far District, spring 2010.  Recipient of the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, he is a Pirogue Fellow …

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Ellen Bass Interview

“I often tell my students, ‘Be brave.’ In poetry, I think we have to recognize that our experience is not unique to us, no matter how personal it is. That we’re more like other people than unlike them, so whatever we reveal, no matter how frightening, is not going to be utterly foreign to others.” …

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Interview with Tina Åmodt

with Nasir Sakandar Tina Åmodt was born in 1985 in Askøy, Norway. She graduated from the prestigious Writing Academy in Bergen, Norway and studied Literary Composition at Gothenburg University. Anleggsprosa is her first collection. Norway is known for the fantastical Norwegian Folktalesabout trolls, unmanned bridges, and people put to the moral test. The country is …

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