In this interview, Columbia Journal online arts editor Jai Hamid Bashir talks to poet Jane Hirshfield about her ninth poetry collection ​Ledger​ ​(Knopf, March 10, 2020), a deeply observant and stunning text about our species relationship with this Earth, beauty, and ourselves.

I was introduced to Paola Antonelli— the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design from the Museum of Modern Art—at her lecture at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in October 2019, Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. I didn’t know how it would feel to have the Senior Curator of Architecture & Design from the Museum of Modern Art stand in front of a decent, 140 or so person crowd and tell me that our extinction was imminent. I knew it to be true already, I learned it in high school in World History: Empires Fall. But I never had anyone say it right to my face. It felt like this:

Today, Valentine’s Day, we wanted to take a moment to offer our affections to the art of translation. Online Translation Editor Stephanie Philp asked translators two questions about the sometimes grueling, always complicated, forever alive practice. We wanted to know: what do they love about translation?

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Melissa Febos about being honest with yourself, dropping out of high school to become a writer, and her next essay collection Girlhood. Melissa Febos is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a best book of 2017. Her third book, Girlhood, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ucross Foundation, and Ragdale. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and an associate professor and graduate director at Monmouth University, her work has recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The Sewanee Review, and The New York Times.

In this interview, Claire Foster spoke to writer and translator Katie Shireen Assef about her recent translation of Black Forest (Deep Vellum), a slim, quiet book of ghosts and grief by French writer, filmmaker and visual artist Valérie Mréjen.

An interview with Ada Calhoun, Columbia Journal 2019 winter contest nonfiction judge. Conducted by Rachel Keranen, print nonfiction editor.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Carmen Maria Machado about her new memoir, In the Dream House. The book explores domestic abuse in a lesbian relationship. Carmen is also the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

The Columbia Journal launches its new podcast as co-hosts Emma Ginader (Online Poetry Editor) and Shalvi Shah (Online Fiction Editor) explore the writing processes of Fall Online competition judges Monica Sok (Poetry) and Akil Kumarasamy (Fiction). Podcast transcript available below.

In this interview, Alanna Duncan spoke to writer Cyrus Grace Dunham about queer bodies, naming, memory, and his new book, A Year Without A Name. The book, Dunham’s first – a memoir – is out from publishing company Little, Brown this month. A member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, he lives in Los Angeles.

In this interview, nonfiction MFA candidate Rachel Rueckert spoke to Terry Tempest Williams about her upcoming essay collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing. In Erosion, Williams explores her connection to the American West, particularly her home state of Utah, as evolutionary process and how our undoing—of the self, self-centeredness, extractive capitalism, fear, tribalism—can also be our becoming, creating room for change and progress.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Leslie Jamison about her new book of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, the slow burn of revision, and how she writes her lyric endings. Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams, and the novel The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper’s, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei and brought up in Malaysia. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other works include Map of the Invisible World, We, the Survivors, and Five Star Billionaire, which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. He is the author of a memoir of an immigrant family, The Face: Strangers on a Pier, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. He is also a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and was a research fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

Rachel Lyon has done something many aspire to do: Made a career for herself as both a successful author and editor. Her debut novel, Self-Portrait With Boy, met with critical success, and is currently being developed as a feature film. Meanwhile, Lyon is the Editor-in-Chief at literary journal Epiphany. As part of our Ask the Editor series, Lyon spoke with MFA non-fiction candidate Elena Sheppard about her career path, what it really means to be an Editor-in-Chief, and what everyone who aspires to this kind of role really needs in their arsenal.

Eva Lou is a Taiwanese-born, American-educated writer who has called Hawaii, New York, Seoul, and Paris home. She has a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University and an MFA in Writing from Columbia University. Lou’s short stories and poems have been anthologized in America and France. Her first collection of short stories, Rapture/d’extases, was published by Editions Lanore in France in a bilingual edition. Her novel-in-progress, QUIETUDE, is a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award. She is the founder of Madeleine Editions, an international independent publishing house for children.

Our resident Print Translation Editor Megan Sungyoon chats with Ed Bok Lee, author of Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019) about family, Korean history, and language as a form of resistance and exploration.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to writer Emily Bernard about her new book of essays Black is the Body and why she can’t resist the emotional cost of showing her scars. Emily Bernard was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She holds a B. A. and Ph. D. in American Studies from Yale University. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Boston Globe Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Green Mountains Review, Oxtford American, Ploughshares, The New Republic, and theatlantic.com. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has received fellowships and grants from Yale University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, and The MacDowell Colony. A contributing editor at The American Scholar, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

Michele Filgate is the kind of person who you can meet for the first time at a co-working space in SoHo, bond over both being indecisive Libras, and feel, because of her kindness and warmth, like you have always known her. Her writing leaves space for a vulnerability that can make you feel like you have always known her, too. In her essay “What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About,” which inspired Filgate’s anthology of the same name, she writes about her relationship with her mother and abusive stepfather with graceful, precise sentences describing the ways in which trauma looks, feels, and sounds: “Here’s what silence sounds like after he loses his temper. After I, in a moment of bravery, scream back at him: You’re NOT my father. It sounds like an egg cracked once against a porcelain bowl. It sounds like the skin of an orange, peeled away from the fruit. It sounds like a muffled sneeze in church.”

Colm Tóibín has spent much of his career unearthing and troubling familial relations in works such as The Testament of Mary, Nora Webster, and New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families. This scholarly and writerly interview probes relationships presented by Tóibín between art and living, psychology and fiction, form and national identities, fiction and politics, art and sexuality, biography and narrative, the writing of a novel and our reading of it. Tóibín was invited as a visiting author to Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York, where I was an instructor at the time. I was privileged to have dinner with him after his reading in March of 2010. Later at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Seattle, Washington during February of 2014, I attended a panel discussion session with Colm Tóibín and American novelist Rachel Kushner. Tóibín discussed a range of topics, including visual art, the historical novel, and the assertion of the writer within public discourse. In June of 2016, Tóibín responded to the following questions about relationships that permeate his writing, extending to the reader an invitation to rethink those relationships as he does in his fiction.

The ways in which you are able to house stories within stories throughout White Dancing Elephants is mesmerizing. Several stories have aspects of nesting dolls, especially with the merging of myth and realism. How did the two influence each other?

“Here’s proof that the algorithm is, in fact, fallible,” begins one panel of Melanie Kruvelis’s New York City grief pamphlet, part travel brochure, part how-to guide for the bereaved: “Spotify compiles no playlists for mourning complicated father-daughter relationships. Maybe grief is just too messy for recommendations curated by capitalism. Besides, what would they call that playlist?…‘Estrangement + Chill’?”