Sylvia Gindick, online poetry editor at the Columbia Journal, spoke with Spring Contest poetry judge, Hanif Addurraqib, to discuss exploratory practices of baking and poetry, the complications of memory and place, the responsibility of the witness, and a writer’s relationship to trust. Abdurraqib, a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio, is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry 2016), Vintage Sadness (Big Lucks 2017), They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio 2017), Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas press 2019), and A Fortune For Your Disaster (Tin House 2019). In March 2021, he will release the book A Little Devil In America with Random House.

Brooke Davis, online arts editor at Columbia Journal, spoke with director and filmmaker Tayo Amos about her short films On The Clock and A Blossom in the Night and creation during the pandemic.

Shalvi J Shah, an MFA candidate in Fiction and Literary Translation and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, talks to author Jenny Bhatt about craft, cultural stereotypes, her debut short story collection Each of Us Killers, and how far artists go to create.

Columbia Journal is excited to introduce our podcast with poet Joe Pan, publisher of Brooklyn Arts Press and the smallest press to ever win the National Book Awards. Hear the episode, which details a conversation between Columbia Journal’s Issue 58 editors Shalvi Shah and Emma Ginader. Find out what it means to be a good literary citizen, how longing and anguish can create space for civic or literary engagement, and the perils and joys of small press publishing in this riveting interview with one of the literary world’s visionaries.

Abhigna Mooraka, Columns Editor for Columbia Journal Issue 59, spoke to author Avni Doshi about her Booker-shortlisted Burnt Sugar, her writing process, and her art history background among other things. Burnt Sugar releases in the United States in January 2021 through The Overlook Press.

Jinwoo Chong, online editor at Columbia Journal, spoke with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, The Refugees, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and The Memory of War, and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America, and the fiction judge of the 2020 Columbia Journal Winter Contest.

Leyton Cassidy, Podcast Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Diane Cook to discuss her debut novel, The New Wilderness, as well as her writing process, relationship with nature, and the religion of writing. The New Wilderness takes place in the near future, where a group of people have elected to live in what remains of a protected wilderness area. The reader follows Bea and her daughter as they struggle to connect, thrive, and simply make it through to the next sunrise. Since its July release, The New Wilderness has already been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. Cook is also the author of a collection of short stories, Man V. Nature, which has received worldly recognition.

“In Sawako Nakayasu’s first poetry collection in seven years, an unsettling diaspora of “girls” is deployed as poetic form, as reclamation of diminutive pseudo-slur, and a characters that take up residence between the think border zones of language, culture, and shifting identity. Written in response to Nakayasu’s 2017 return to the US, this maximalist collection invites us to reexamine our own complicity in reinforcing conventions, literary and otherwise. The book radicalizes notions of “translation” as both process and product, running a kind of linguistic interference that is intimate, feminist, mordant and jagged” Wave Books stated in their press release.

Chen Maoping, known by her pen name Sanmao, was born in 1943 in Chongqing, China. A prolific writer and an ardent traveler, Sanmao lived in Taiwan, the Canary Islands, Central American, and Western Africa. Her life in countries abroad gave birth to over fourteen books, the most well-known of which, Stories of the Sahara, a hybrid of memoir and travelogue, catapulted her into the role of one of the most captivating and enigmatic writers at the time in the Chinese-speaking world.

Kate Sullivan, Social Media Manager for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Lynn Steger Strong to discuss her second novel Want, a book that explores the complexities of motherhood, lost friendship, and the ways in which we live in, and in spite of, broken systems. The protagonist grapples with precarity amidst an aggregation of desires, while Steger Strong’s prose reminds us of language’s limits and the many voids it creates.

Madeline Garfinkle, Columns Editor for the Columbia Journal, sat down with Hilary Leichter to discuss her new book, Temporary, a debut novel that addresses the paradox of work-life balance and what we sacrifice of ourselves for a career. The unnamed narrator, who is a designated Temp, sifts through a series of jobs which include working on a pirate ship, filling in for an endangered species, serving alongside a murderer, and acting as a boy’s mother, just to name a few. The novel brings forth essential questions about the value of work, time, and how life can slip through our fingers.

Hay caballos en su pubis, hay caballos en su vientre, en
su pelvis hay una gaita algebraica, hay unos engranajes
de volteo, hay galápagos, en su vientre. Hay galápagos y
golpes: galopes.

Frances Cha is the author of the novel If I Had Your Face. She grew up in the United States, Hong Kong and South Korea, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in English Literature and Asian Studies. For her MFA in Creative Writing she attended Columbia University, where she received a Dean’s Fellowship. She worked as the assistant managing editor of Samsung Economic Research Institute’s business journal in Seoul and as a travel and culture editor for CNN International in Seoul and Hong Kong. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, V Magazine, WWD and The Believer among other publications. Most recently, her short story “As Long As I Live” was published in the Korean-language anthology New York Story (Artizan Books, Korea). She has taught Media Studies at Ewha Womens University, Creative Writing at Columbia University and Yonsei University, and lectured at Seoul National University. She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters and spends summer in Seoul, South Korea.

Shalvi Shah is the Online Fiction Editor of Columbia Journal for the 2019-2020 year. She is pursuing a joint MFA in Fiction and Translation at Columbia University, where she is a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow for the 2020-2021 academic year. Here she speaks with Cha about her debut novel If I Had Your Face, and about art, men and women, Korean culture, and the wheels of writing.

In this interview, Jasmine Vojdani speaks with writer Porochista Khakpour about fragmented identity, being Iranian in America, regret, and her new book, The Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity. In The Brown Album, Khakpour traces lifelong experiences of alienation and cultural confusion. Her family left revolutionary Iran and relocated to Los Angeles a year after her birth, but this was not the glitzy, gilded L.A. of Tehrangeles so often associated with Iranian America. These essays recount Khakpour’s horror of appearing “other” as a child, her uncanny attempts to alter her appearance and affinities in hopes of belonging, and the ways that 9/11 ultimately upended her understanding of her place as an immigrant in America.

Max Asher Miller, Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal for 2020-2021, spoke with Stephen Graham Jones about his forthcoming novel, The Only Good Indians, a bloody book with eyes on cycles of violence, basketball, and what it means to navigate Native American identity.

Poet, essayist, and translator Ulalume González de León believed that “Everything has already been said,” and, thus, that each act of creation is a rewriting, reshuffling, and reconstructing of one great work. For this reason, she chose the title Plagios (Plagiarisms) for her book of collected poems. Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz called Ulalume González de León “the best Mexicana poet since Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” recognizing the visionary quality of her work.

Based on her 2015 Vice article, “London, Ontario was a Racist Asshole to Me,” Eternity Martis wrote a memoir of her time in college, They Said This Would be Fun, which comes out this March 31. The book follows Martis’ time at Western University and the racism and sexism she experienced there. This is not a book about one time or place, though. The systemic issues and lack of formal policy to bring stories like hers to light are widespread. Martis writes about the body in stressful and harmful times, boyfriends gone so wrong they dip into Greek tragedy, and separates the chapters with pithy interstitials named “The Necessary Survival Guide for Token Students.” Her memoir dives into friendship, family connection and growing up as a woman. It is her first of a two-book deal with McClelland & Stewart. In this interview, Columbia Journal’s Online Translation Editor Stephanie Philp caught up with her over the phone. Eternity Martis is an award-winning Toronto-based journalist and editor whose work has been featured in The Huffington Post, VICE, Chatelaine, Canadaland, Salon, CBC, Hazlitt, The Walrus, The Ryerson Review of Journalism, J-Source, Xtra, The Fader, Complex and many more.

In this interview, Editor-in-Chief spoke with writer Sarah Ramey about her debut memoir, The Lady’s Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness (Doubleday), a book that examines the author’s years-long battle with an illness that doctors found themselves unable to diagnose and the overall treatment of women’s pain in the U.S. healthcare system. Here, she discusses the role structure plays in the work, the process of healing through research, and why she does not mind calling herself a “hope monger.”

In this interview, Sarah Gheyas spoke to Peter Frankopan about his latest book, The New Silk Roads, which looks at the shifting geopolitics and the rising global influence of industrial powerhouses of Central Asia. Peter Frankopan authored the highly acclaimed international bestseller, The New Silk Roads: The Future and Present of the World (Bloomsbury 2018) and The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury 2015), both of which have been translated into more than thirty languages. Other notable books include a revised translation of The Alexiad (Penguin Classics 2009) and The First Crusade: The Call from the East (Harvard University Press, 2012). He’s written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The London Evening Standard. Prospect Magazine named him One of the World’s 50 Top Thinkers in 2019. He currently chairs the Ondaatje Prize at the Royal Society of Literature, the Cundill History Prize and the Runciman Book Prize. He is professor of Global History at Oxford University, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is also the founder of the hotel franchise, A Curious Group of Hotels.

Nina St. Pierre speaks with author Paul Lisicky in this interview about his sixth book, the memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World. Set in the early ’90s, Later is a prismatic rendering of life in Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the height of the HIV and AIDs epidemic. In Later, Lisicky renders it a one-word mythology: “Town”—a location both in and out of time, where the synthesis between death, sex, and community, is nuanced, contradictory, and ultimately, life-affirming.