Fiction Spotlight: Peter Orner

In a striking moment from the novella that caps Peter Orner’s Maggie Brown & Others (Little Brown), the main character, Walt Kaplan, hears his young daughter hovering outside the door to his study. She is watching him through the door’s keyhole. Walt goes to the door and kneels to look through the keyhole, his eye seeing,…

Poetry Contributor: Molly Spencer

Molly Spencer’s starkly lovely collection of poems, If the House, speaks from an undeniably domestic perspective, but her subjects range from the deeply personal to the global and widely felt. Poems navigate the line between memory and presence and explore many kinds of absence: stillness, silence, white space, the foreclosure of a house, the dissolution…

Poetry Spotlight: Keetje Kuipers

Sweet and bittersweet in turns, Keetje Kuiper’s All Its Charms (2019, BOA Editions) is a collection of love notes: reflections on time spent with her wife and daughter, quiet moments of observation, pockets of domestic calm. From this place of tenderness, Kuiper’s intelligent poems peel away self-importance and culpability to acknowledge larger, looming conflicts, from the…

Fiction Spotlight: Ed Pavlić

Ed Pavlić’s début novel Another Kind of Madness weaves an intricate narrative as two people return to Chicago: Ndiya Grayson, who navigates professional life with high-end lawyers, and Shame Luther, carving out an existence as an intense temp laborer. Their reasons for leaving still not behind them, Ndiya’s chance night out and Shame’s self-taught talent…

Poetry Spotlight: Anne Barngrover

Anne Barngrover’s Brazen Creature is a fierce contemplation on the relationship between pain and yearning. The pain of the body. The pain of loss. The pain of the woods. The collection refers to our sufferer as The Waiting Girl, whose hair is always singed, and the men throughout are varying degrees of disappointment. Despite a familiar…

Poetry Spotlight: Jill McDonough

Jill McDonough‘s newest collection of poetry, Here All Night, is a unique mix of free verse and sonnets that invites readers into tales of domesticity and community, though not everything is joyous and kind. In Here All Night, McDonough makes brilliant use of humor to analyze the economy, gender discrimination, and the penal system of America. With…

Fiction Spotlight: Caitlin Horrocks

One of the absolute best short story collections published in the last decade, This Is Not Your City, was released in 2011 not by one of the big five publishing houses, but by the Louisville-based indie darling, Sarabande Books. The collection’s deftly precise stories had been featured in journals like Tin House, The Paris Review, Third Coast, and…

Poetry Spotlight: Katie Peterson

In her most recent poetry collection, A Piece of Good News (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Katie Peterson generously gathers the elements in our lives that can often feel most disparate: the private and public, the present and past, the personal and the universal. While the poems are almost always grounded in personal experience—driving around town with parents,…

Poetry Spotlight: Diana Khoi Nguyen

Ghost of, selected by Terrance Hayes as the winner of Omnidawn’s 2017 Open Book Contest, is the first book of poetry by poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, and was named a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. The book is an unflinching examination of the suicide of Nguyen’s brother and…

Fiction Spotlight: Joanna Pearson

The stories in Joanna Pearson’s collection, Every Human Love, are haunting. They border the realms of real and mystical, taking us down stretches of a wooded, rural highway one minute and the next, through city streets at night, a lurker watching menacingly from an alley. Characters are rendered so vividly they could be standing outside your…