Posts From Author: Month: May 2016

Seriously Questioning… Stephen Burt

Stephen Burt is a poet, critic, and professor of English at Harvard. In 2009, his guide to reading contemporary poetry, Close Calls With Nonsense, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent poetry collection, Belmont (Graywolf Press, 2013) is a brilliant sequence of surprising, absurdist, sexually supple verse, flush with the joys of parenthood, adventurous in its versification, unafraid of living and loving. There’s a poem about the Muppets. One’s titled “For Avril Lavigne”. Another is told from the perspective of your standard office stapler (“I have no use for a doctrine of non- / attachment, although I once / put an argument for it together”). Stephen is one of the guests at our Seriously Entertaining show When Strangers Meet at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on June 13. Name: Stephen Burt. Steph, in person. Sometimes also Stephanie. Age: 45, perhaps alas. Where are you from? Washington, DC. Childhood in the Maryland suburbs, but really, DC. What is your occupation? I’m a college professor. I teach people how to read and talk about poetry, except when I am teaching them how to read and talk about comic books. Title of most recent work: The Poem Is You: Sixty Contemporary American Poems and How to Read […]
Read More

Seriously Questioning… Jessica Strand

Jessica Strand is the host of New York Public Library’s fantastic Books at Noon series and used to coordinate Strand Book Store’s public events too, though the shared name is coincidental. She will be our guest on June 13 at the next Seriously Entertaining show, When Strangers Meet. Name: Jessica Strand Age: Between 12 and 90. Where are you from? Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. What is your occupation? Cultural programmer/interviewer. Title of most recent work: Upstairs at the Strand: Writers in Conversation at the Legendary Bookstore (Norton, 2016). What are you working on now? A poetry anthology out next spring, beginning a slim memoir on my dad [the poet Mark Strand]. What’s your earliest memory of literature? Asking my mother to take the Babar book (I can’t remember which one, but there were spirits in it) out of my bedroom when she put me to bed. There wasn’t much of a line between reality and fiction when I was four, and I was convinced that the ghoulish creatures would come out of the book and into my room. What is your petite madeleine? I’m going to answer this one with food, simpler that way — spaghetti carbonara. What do you most look forward […]
Read More

Seriously Questioning… Ayana Mathis

In Ayana Mathis‘s first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf Doubleday, 2012), a young woman moves to Philadelphia after her father is murdered in Jim Crow-era Georgia. There, she has twins, but they succumb to pneumonia in infancy. The twelve tribes of the title are her dead twins, her nine other children, and one grandchild; the novel itself is a biblically inflected family saga and a powerfully moving re-creation of a dark time in American history. A masterful debut, it was a New York Times Notable Book and an Oprah selection. It’s also an excellent introduction to a major new voice in American fiction. Mathis is a professor of creative writing and a frequent contributor to The New York Times — you can read her thoughts on the most terrifying book she’s read, which subjects are underrepresented in contemporary fiction, the duties of historical fiction, and more. In Michiko Kakutani’s words, “Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters’ stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison’s writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own — both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters’ minds and hearts.” Name: Ayana Mathis […]
Read More

On Face Value

The Face: Cartography of the Void Chris Abani Restless Books, 2016; 96pp What do our faces say about us — and how much of what they say is fair? That’s one of the questions posed by Restless Books’s intriguing new series The Face, in which writers use their own countenances as launchpads into the imaginative stratosphere. We are promised “unique perspectives on race, culture, identity, and the human experience”, and in Chris Abani‘s Cartography of the Void, part of the series’s inaugural triptych (along with short works by Ruth Ozeki and Tash Aw), we’re not disappointed. Abani is the son of an English mother and an Igbo father, and was raised in Afikpo, Nigeria. Put another way: “Biologically my face is a mix of two races, of two cultures, of two lineages.” On one side, there’s the Celt or Anglo-Saxon influence of the matrilineal line; on the other, the Egu and Ehugbo influence passed through his father. Like many people of mixed-race origin, Abani often experiences feelings of alienation depending on where he is. He’s “firmly black, of unknown origin” to Westerners, yet “not entirely African” to people in Nigeria. Everywhere he travels, he is the Other that fits: “In New Zealand I was assumed to be […]
Read More