In this interview, the poet Mary Ann Samyn talks about her first encounters with Emily Dickinson’s work, her best advice for writing students, and her new collection, Air, Light, Dust, Shadow, Distance, out now from 42 Miles Press.

Laughing babies all over the wall
The moment you set your eyes on them
after waking up in the morning,

Happy Banned Books Week! Since 1982, this annual event has celebrated books that have been banned from and challenged in schools, bookstores, and libraries. To honor the freedom to read and express ideas, the Columbia Journal staff has compiled a list our favorite banned books. Join the conversation by following the #BannedBooksWeek hashtag on Twitter.

In this interview with MFA candidate Sarah Rosenthal, Nicole Chung talks about confronting family lore surrounding her adoption, discovering revision ideas in her dreams, and editing a memoir while grieving. Chung is the author of the forthcoming memoir All You Can Ever Know, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, GQ, Longreads, and Hazlitt.

In this interview, the poet Bill King talks about his new poetry collection, The Letting Go, what he’s learned from fatherhood, and the importance of sacred spaces for writers.

Why does my body ache
more than ever now
Not just because I am rounding

In this interview, MFA nonfiction candidate Dodie Miller-Gould speaks with writer and Columbia professor Deborah Eisenberg. Eisenberg is the author of Your Duck is My Duck, forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins on September 25. Eisenberg’s work is polite but poignant. Her characters are drawn with an intelligence that engages readers.

How does a writer ethically engage with a story of trauma—specifically the trauma of a Syrian refugee family—in his work? How is that task complicated by writing a book for “readers of all ages,” encompassing, in that broad category, children who may not have yet faced the topic of the Syrian refugee crisis? In reading Khaled Hosseini’s latest book, Sea Prayer, we can glean the answers to these questions.

Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, her first book, is a provocative, enlightening, and often depressing piece of nonfiction about women and their anger. Each chapter is thematically oriented and researched to startlingly lucid detail, using a lens through which women and men are compared in order to highlight the savage disparities between the two. These topics range from the bleakly mundane, like workplace relations and domestic labor, to the downright harrowing; a particularly difficult chapter to digest recounts sexual assault cases (many ending in rape and murder), listed one after the other like a morbid shopping list. It may sound off-puttingly clinical, but that’s entirely the point. Chemaly’s voice is research-driven, and impeccably so; allowing the pervasive everyday of gender bias to wash over the reader without their immediate knowledge.

My daughter’s sleep / wave machine
becomes a granular datum of cheer

Lemon Swarm
It is summer’s end, lurid and mutable.
The black pigs graze acorns in semi-freedom.
Perhaps my need to appear

In conversation with Columbia Journal’s Online Poetry Editor Brian Wiora, the poet Richie Hofmann discusses growing up in Germany, reading translated poems, and of course, his poetry. After reading this interview, we hope you will read a selection of his poems, published on the Columbia Journal website.

The Word Process is an interview series focusing on the writing process and aimed at illuminating the many ways that writers approach the same essential task. In this interview, the writer Olivia Laing discusses the spaces she works, the one skill that writers need, and the writers she returns to again and again. Her novel Crudo will be released in the U.S. on September 10, 2018.

Six poems by the Chinese poets Yu Nu and Xiao Shui, and Taiwanese Lee Chin-Wen, translated from Chinese by N. Noéll.

It was mid-April and the snow had already melted by the time my husband and I and our two young children arrived at Our Lady of the Snows, a Trappist monastery in the Ardèche region of southeast France. Along with Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite and my writing journal, I’d packed my ISYM (I’ll-show-you-motherfucker) list all the men I’d ever slept with, save my husband of eleven years. I’d been struggling let go of the list, and now ready, planned to burn it at some point during our stay.

In this interview with recent Barnard College graduate Juliana Clark, Wayétu Moore discusses her transformative debut novel She Would Be King, a retelling of Liberia’s formation story steeped in magical realism. Through this conversation, Moore reveals the intentions behind a number of her narrative and character-based choices and parses out the themes central to this work. Aside from her vocation as a writer, Moore is an educator at the City University of New York’s John Jay College and the founder of One Moore Book, a publisher of educational stories for children whose cultures have been underrepresented in the publishing industry or are from countries with low literacy rates.

Welcome to Blurbed, a new round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed will feature a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

I first read Rebecca Solnit in San Rafael, just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. It’s the perfect place to read her: San Francisco is a place she currently calls home and the Bay Area has influenced her writing since at least her days as a graduate student in journalism at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. At the behest of my boss, I read her seminal feminist essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” on my work computer. It was from this piece that the term “mansplaining” was spawned, though Solnit herself didn’t coin it. To write an essay which rings true to so many individuals’ experience as to popularize a new word is a feat, and Solnit has already accomplished it.

It was you, wasn’t it, Belmira? I know you can’t hear me, now that you’ve gone someplace far away and there’s no point in thinking you’ll ever come back. I’m alone, I and our secret, and I don’t even know how long I’ll be able to keep it, because the note, forgive me, Bel, I think I left the damn thing at Antonio’s house, I don’t know exactly where, but in that moment of shock, I ended up dropping the envelope in the middle of all that mess and only realized I’d left it behind when I’d already made it out into the street.

The house is endless only in its emptiness, so vast
there seemed trapped the wind itself. And what this woman wants