Critical Literary Consumption

Best friends Chen Chen and Sam Herschel Wein discuss their collaborative chapbook, Love That For Us , published by & Change Poetry. They share how their friendship and poetics formed, that fateful residency in Portland, Oregon, pop culture as critical history, and silliness and queer joy. As they are long-distance friends, Chen and Sam also reflect on spatial and physical revising for emotiona...

Saeed Jones traces his poetic roots through his sense of place and placemaking, identity, education, and his experiences writing in multiple genres. Considering how freeing the poetic form can be, Jones talks about the fictional element and the many personas embedded in his poems. Because we grew up in the south, he also reflects on the prominence of the south in his work and how “the south” is it...

In discussing her books, Fresh Banana Leaves and Growing Papaya Plants , Indigenous scientist Dr. Jessica Hernandez talks about turning her attention from a non-native but displaced relative (banana trees) to a native plant relative (papaya trees) to discuss climate displacement and migration. She also shares her thoughts on the binary of Western science and Indigenous science, writing scientifica...

A character who is dissatisfied in her own marriage will likely struggle to be a mother, says Thammika Songkaeo. Discussing her debut novel, Stamford Hospital, Thammika explores the complexity of womanhood, intimacy and relationships, the limitations of intersectionality as a framework, class analysis, colorism in Asia, and the international novel. We also bonded over our experiences in our respec...

Kaila Yu's Fetishized: A Reckoning With Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty is written as memoir-in-essays that serves as media and cultural analysis. We discussed how she situated her personal experiences as part of her research process, analyzing the broader Asian American landscape and history, revisiting her own media, the import scene, and representation.

Tanya Guerrero shares how her love of animals and her volunteer experiences with Trap/Neuter/Return (TNR) shaped her first adult novel,  Cat’s People . We discussed the popular trend of cat-centered novels and the porous genre question for stories that straddle literary fiction, popular fiction, and speculative fiction. The conversation ends with Tanya’s upcoming project, about a real-life dog fig...

Dr. Karen Throsby, author of  Sugar Rush: Science, politics and the demonisation of fatness , discusses how the public and scientific framings of sugar and health are focused on the nutritional gaze of a single nutrient which obscures the more institutional analyses of race and class. Analyzing 20+ years of datasets about sugar in the media, Throsby uses the sugar to discourse to examine politics...

Dr. Matthieu Chapman previews his forthcoming book, Shakespeare and Antiblack World-making , in which reflects on the fields of Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies and Early Modern Studies. He discusses why he portrays Shakespeare as the ultimate colonizer, his sentiments about the ideal of ‘reading generously” and its connection to universality, and how the field of Early Modern Studies was built on...

Calling Slow Noodles her one story, Chantha Nguon recounts being hesitant to write about her life until her collaborator, Kim Green, suggested that she write a recipe book. When she began reviving these food-related memories, she didn’t realize they would lead to her telling her life story. Here, she talks about Year Zero, food and hunger, and her work experience in NGOs, the creation of Stung Tre...

Following  Chemistry  and  Joan Is Okay , Weike Wang again reflects on labor, home, place, and identity in  Rental House , a novel that follows an interracial couples’ two vacations. She describes how Keru and Nate’s marriage is one that is ubiquitous in America but is hardly written about in the literary world. We also discuss race and class analysis, DINK (double income, no kids), politics as a...

Brandon Shimoda discusses his pursuit of similar questions during his writing and research for his two longer books, The Grave on the Wall and The Afterlife is Letting Go , which are about Japanese American history, incarceration, violence, colonialism, ancestors, and family history. Both works are a blend of poetry and prose, which are woven as interviews, verse, and personal stories, and reflect...

Chen Chen talks about genre, creative writing pedagogy, race, and politics as he reflects on his two full-length poetry collections, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA Editions). On the topic of contextual and cultural references, we discussed our displeasure of the general tendency to reference Wo...

To celebrate Halloween and the season of extremes, K-Ming Chang returns to discuss Organ Meats , which is the final story in her mythic triptych (or what she calls the “fecal trio”). She extends her thoughts on experimenting with maximalist language first and making metaphors literal. She also reflects on her process writing the tonally different novella Cecilia , which features her usual meditati...

Aditi Machado previews her upcoming poetry collection, Material Witness (Nightboat Books), and reflects on the concept and act of "witnessing". Witnessing then makes its poetic way into her questions of human/non-human relationality, plurality of subjects, language and etymology, and how we experience the world.

Morgan Talty shares his thoughts on this peculiar thing called genre and his experiences writing short stories ( Night of the Living Rez ) and a novel (his debut, Fire Exit ). We talk about his reasons for writing from the perspective of a white character, and the bigger questions of colonization, the limitations of blood quantum, law, and the legal fictions associated with race and ideology.

My diaCritics book review focused and critiqued this ever recurring topic of nostalgia in diasporic memoirs, and Lieu shares her own thoughts on critical nostalgia, its connection to the tragedy of the living, and her desire to excavate her family memories. In capturing life as a Vietnamese American daughter in California during the 1990s, Lieu reflects on writing The Manicurist’s Daughter , which...

To think about sex work differently, Dr. Juana María Rodríguez (University of California, Berkeley) argues that we too will need to think about sex differently. Specifically, her project argues against merely ending the discussion at decriminalization, which essentializes sex work as stigma turned into law. In  Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex , she connects state surveillance and the visual...

Erica N. Cardwell reflects on writing Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art , a possible anti-memoir that features essays on the importance of art criticism, visuality, grief, and radical Black imagination. Because the visual aspects of Cardwell's stories and analysis are so striking, she also shares stories of the art featured on the book cover and accompanying essays.

Dr. Matthieu Chapman discusses his experiences with genre shift from academic writing to his beautiful hybrid memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life . He shares his thoughts on craft, genre, “the canon” in Early Modern Studies, the fallacy that Shakespeare is inclusive, and the importance of Afropessimism.

At the beginning of the new year, I talked to Athena Dixon about the release of her latest book, The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays . She shares how the book came to be and how she interrogated the concept of loneliness in all of its manifestations through research, personal life, fandoms, pop culture, technology, the pandemic, and more. 

In Nishanth Injam's stunning debut collection,  The Best Possible Experience , examines the social ails of life abroad as an adult immigrant. In the episode, Nishanth discusses how fragments and contours of his personal life weave into his fiction as a way to translate, preserve, and document memories of home and family. He also shares his thoughts on technology and labor, craft decisions, and...

In her debut book, A Flat Place: A Memoir , Dr. Noreen Masud traces the longstanding impacts of colonialism in flat places and landscapes while sharing intimate stories of her formative years in Pakistan, her family, trauma and therapy, and her sojourns to Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney. In the interview, we also address the two different subtitles in their respective U.K....

What would resistance against capitalism and neoliberalism look like in the intimate sphere is one of the major questions Sophie K. Rosa reflects upon in her debut book,  Radical Intimacy . Thinking through many social movements (Black Lives Matter, climate justice, FreeBritney, political scandals in the U.K.), she shares her thoughts on using theoretical language (e.g., Sophie Lewis’s work on abo...

Mai Nardone talks about his first book, the story collection  Welcome Me to the Kingdom , which spans four decades and traces urbanization of the late 1980s, the financial crisis of 1997, and the current landscape in Thailand. He talks about his studies in economics and how this perspective shaped the focus on labor and the many industries (tourism, sex), racialization, travel, religious communiti...

Lamya H. speaks about writing an unapologetically queer and Muslim text in her debut work, Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir , which chronicles her formative years in a Middle Eastern country and her continuing education in the United States. She recalls writing “Hajar” as a standalone essay, and how she formed and shaped a narrative arc that shaped the memoir extrapolating foundational texts like the Q...