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blog

Exceptional Beyond Exclusion: A Review of What to feel, how to feel

November 20, 2025 | blog, book reviews

Review by Todd Tremble, MFA ’27What to feel, how to feel180 pp. Palimpsest Press. $21.95 US / $21.95 CDN “If I can see and sense the world, then why can it not welcome me?” is the central question investigated in What to feel, how to feel, Shane Neilson’s debut book of “lyric essays on neurodivergence...

Fatally Online: A Review of Mark Doten's Whites

November 18, 2025 | blog, book reviews

Review by Carson Oliver, MFA ’26Whites160 pp. Graywolf. $17.00 Mark Doten’s first story collection, Whites, is explosive, reckless, and abrasive. Firmly situated in the era of the internet, COVID, and Trump, this collection epitomizes the confusion of modern times. While Don DeLillo’s White Noise tackled the advent of TV with a deft irony, Whites feels...

Fragmentation, Apocalypse and the Anti-Novel: An Interview with Dan Leach

November 11, 2025 | blog, Interviews

As someone who was in middle school during Y2K and 9/11, I (James Passaro, MFA ‘26) understood the times and seasons of Junah at the End of the World. Dan Leach’s portrayal of a middle school boy in Carolina who is navigating his parent’s separation, his first romance and the looming threat of apocalypse is a...

Catching up with 2025 Non-Fiction Prize Winner Brandon Toh

October 9, 2025 | Awards, blog

Brandon Toh is a Singaporean writer and translator. He is an ALTA Travel Fellow and his works have placed in the Stephen Spender Prize and Another Chicago Magazine Nonfiction Contest. TLT: “The Difference Between Ghost and Ghost and Ghost” feels so deeply personal, like you’re sharing your family archive with us. Why did you choose...

An Interview with Gary Jackson, author of small lives

October 7, 2025 | blog, news

Growing up, I (Mary McCall, MFA ‘26), was an avid comic book enthusiast and poet. So, I was extremely intrigued by Gary Jackson’s small lives and how his work intersects these two worlds. This poetry collection reimagines traditional superhero tropes to explore the struggles of power, identity, and survival within the realms of Black lives...

Time and Memory: A Review of Great Disasters

September 30, 2025 | blog, book reviews

Review by Anjali Chanda, MFA ’27Great Disasters208 pp. Tin House Books. $17.99 Grady Chambers’s debut novel Great Disasters is distinguished by its melodic prose, delivered with a memorable lyricism, and its balance of the personal and political, something novels often neglect to do. Like many literary fiction pieces, Great Disasters rests in the cavity of...

Catching up with 2025 Fiction Prize Winner Mary Jean Babic

September 30, 2025 | Awards, blog

Mary Jean Babic grew up in Illinois and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. Her writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other publications. She works as a content designer in the financial industry. She self-published Central Standard a collection of stories and essays, earlier this year....

Catching up with 2025 Poetry Prize Winner Samuel Piccone

September 30, 2025 | Awards, blog

   Samuel Piccone is the author of Domestica (University of Arkansas Press, 2026), winner of the 2025 Miller Williams Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He serves as poetry editor at Raleigh Review, and is an assistant teaching professor at Iowa State University. HS: What about Judi Dench’s line from Spaceship Earth...

An Interview with Imani Perry, author of Black in Blues

April 8, 2025 | blog

Celebrated author Imani Perry recently spoke at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, in association with the International African American Museum. She discussed her most recent book, Black in Blues, an exploration of the color blue and its presence and symbolism throughout Black history. Lenore Barnes, MFA student at the College of Charleston, had the privilege...

Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness

April 8, 2025 | blog, book reviews

Review by Michela Polito, MFA ’25 Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness 244 pp. Guernica Editions. $18.95 In Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness, Danila Botha writes with wit, grit, and a sort of fictional non-conformity that resists easy labels. Across this generous collection, she unpacks a range of themes, spanning from alienation, identity, intergenerational trauma, and...

2025 Writing Conferences and Festivals

February 11, 2025 | blog, news

Attending a writing conference or festival can allow time to focus on your creative output and gain inspiration and insight while engaging with fellow writers. In addition to generative workshops, most conferences offer sessions with experienced representatives of the business side of publishing, including agents and editors. We hope this list of writing conferences and...

A Review of Evie Shockley's suddenly we

November 15, 2024 | blog, book reviews

Review by Tanner Crunelle, MFA ’24suddenly we112 pp. Wesleyan University Press. $15.95 Evie Shockley’s latest collection of poetry, suddenly we, contains the songs of a poet whose heart is so capacious it’s almost from another planet. We sail with Shockley into an Afrofuturist horizon, equipped with Toni Morrison’s proverb: “I refuse the prison of ‘I’ and...