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Department of English College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Interviews

Reyumeh Ejue

Friday May 16, 2025

Interviewed by Yolanda Kwadey What prompted you to write “Natives”? I promise not to let this response get too longwinded because it’s a favorite chew-bone of mine, haha! I’m from Nigeria, but I now live in the US. When I was in Nigeria, I couldn’t wait to leave, just like other people my age can’t […]

Ernest Hilbert

Friday May 16, 2025

Interviewed by Chloe Cook and Taylor Light “Swimming South Off Key West” and “Unruled” exhibit a subtle and pleasant attention to sound, especially with internal rhyme. How do you employ prosody in your work? Do you actively reach for the rhymes, or do they subconsciously make their way into your poems? The sound of a […]

Brett Hymel Jr.

Friday May 16, 2025

Interviewed by Albertine Clarke In “Sweepstakes,” you have two ostensibly extraterrestrial characters, Glorp and Thoraxis. One of the things that interests me the most about this story is the role of the extraterrestrial, both within Dean’s internal world and outside of it. To phrase it as simply as I can—in writing, what is the role […]

Piotr Florczyk

Friday May 16, 2025

Interviewed by Jonathan Wolf You’ve said that your earliest poems (“doodles of thought and emotion”) arrived shortly after you moved from Kraków to California. What can you say about the urge to write? Was there any initial, galvanizing experience that set you chattering? And at what point—and how—did writing become more than a mere enjoyment? […]

Jehanne Dubrow

Saturday January 6, 2024

Interviewed by Taylor Johnson “Dear Geryon—,” “Dear Glass—,” “Dear Camera—,” and “Dear Cat’s Eye Marble—” all embody the form of a right-aligned sonnet. Could you share a little bit about how you employed form and formal structures when crafting these poems? How did the writing process shape or reflect their content? These four poems come […]

Nicholas Friedman

Friday January 5, 2024

Interviewed by Chloe Cook Could we begin with location? “Ampersand,” like other poems in your collection Petty Theft, is grounded in the Northeast where you currently live. (For example, “Cozy Cottages…” is set in Cape Cod.) What is your connection to the Northeast, and how does regionality inform your work? I appreciate the soft pitch […]

Carol Moldaw

Friday January 5, 2024

Interviewed by Olivia Burnett Your website bio describes you as an “American lyric poet.” What draws you to writing lyric poetry, and how do you see yourself engaging with the lyric tradition? Lyric poetry draws me to it by its crystalline beauty, by the way it can be a sound chamber, a still point, fireworks: […]

Erin O’Luanaigh

Tuesday May 2, 2023

Interviewed by Gregory Calabro and Peter Vertacnik Could we start by hearing a little bit about the importance of form in these poems—especially that of “Salomé” given how its shape deviates from a “typical” sonnet (though we’d love to hear about any of the other five as well). “Salomé” is an odd one, isn’t it? […]

Wayne Miller

Friday June 3, 2022

Interviewed by Lupita Eyde-Tucker Let’s start with the first poem, which is called “American Domestic.” That title calls up a tradition of poems that talk about American domesticity, whatever that might be. What does that mean to you? And how do you think this poem plays into that tradition? I guess I was thinking of […]

Mary O’Donoghue

Friday June 3, 2022

Interviewed by Patrick Duane The story, “Late Style,” happens on Zoom. There isn’t a strict setting or place. When did you start writing this story? I started it four years ago, and its early moves predate the online life of the pandemic. All that time ago, the story started exactly where we enter the story […]

Declan Ryan

Friday June 3, 2022

Interviewed by Will Carpenter and Edward Sambrano ES: Declan, thanks again for meeting with us today. So, the first question we have for you concerns the fact that you seem to be about equally well-known for your reviews and your essays as for your poetry. I want to ask: do you find that your prose […]

Jennifer Moxley

Friday September 24, 2021

Interviewed by Jason Gordy Walker Your poem “1900” opens with “[a]n old cuss in a MAGA mask.” As the poem progresses, you touch upon the speaker’s personal history, which seems at odds with the political climate(s) it references. I also found the grandmother’s history to be especially moving. During your drafting process, did you consciously […]

Laurence O’Dwyer

Thursday September 23, 2021

Interviewed by Janice Whang One of the primary pleasures of this essay was how it obsessed over and revered the “back-end” processes and tools of creating, challenging notions of labor and treasure. This essay is a polished “front-end” product that the reader gets to enjoy. Could you speak on one of the mundane, industrial, dirty […]

Natanya Biskar

Thursday September 23, 2021

Interviewed by Payal Nagpal You write about the independent school your narrator works at with a great deal of fondness and a touch of cynicism. I was wondering how your own experience working at independent schools influences your writing—your experiences have obviously served as fodder for some great content, but beyond that, has working with […]
Sylvie Baumgartel

Sylvie Baumgartel

Thursday September 23, 2021

Sylvie Baumgartel’s essay “Fat Man and Little Boy,” originally published in Subtropics Issue 32, has been selected by Vivian Gornick for Best American Essays 2023.
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