Danez Smith’s newest collection, Homie, takes their readers on a dazzlingly divine, chaotic, radically loving, and politically astute hang-out. Smith is a black and queer poet-performer who also wrote the acclaimed collection, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017). They craft their follow-up book to come out swinging as a commemoration of friends, the black community, and the queer self. Smith observes the world around them with a sense of beautiful kindness.

“We’re not sure why the pond turns pink; I mean, there are theories,” Zed said, right hand forcefully punctuating his words, left hand on the wheel.

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?

Conversational Spanish
pay gar(d) la go-rrah: we are broke and we love Jesus, the way only broke people can.
oh-(h)allah, cay? you eva cafe en el camp-o: Lets drink wine, a lot of wine. Miracles of wine.
And when the water comes, or the fires burn, pray like only the washed away can pray.

“It’s been twelve years of love and quiet work to get it here,” Douglas Stuart recently said on Instagram of his debut novel. “The first draft was 900 pages long and needed to be housed in two ring binders. There has been 13 drafts since, and lots of self doubt, laughter, and distractions along the way.” A similar range of emotions can be experienced when reading Shuggie Bain, a heart-wrenching tale that unfolds and unravels across 400 pages and more than a decade of love, loss, and pride.

I can’t find them in abandoned pit mines scattered lakes of
limestone & water łužiska jĕzorina villages on the land
seized treasure your voices of coal and rock crushed

Now 84, Vivian Gornick has written an essay collection she could not have completed when she was younger. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, recently published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, is the product of a perspective that comes only with time. In this book, she describes her lifelong habit of reading and re-reading books. She notes the ways both the impact of those books and her interpretations of them have evolved as she has aged.

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.

the sparrows
they let their wings down
& I let the dishes gather
I was not as I wanted

National Book Award winner Lily Tuck is very familiar with tackling the plights of women characters across time and place in her writing. Her latest work, Heathcliff Redux and Other Stories, picks up on these themes while also playing with form. Comprised of a novella and four short stories, the collection looks at human situations with control and complexity as Tuck takes readers through a number of case studies where characters hope (mostly to little avail) to be an exception to the cruel rules of reality.

At the Columbia Journal, we believe in creating space for and celebrating traditionally underrepresented voices. We seek out and support marginalized writers year-round, but this March marks our first ever Womxn’s History Month special issue. Our website will feature writing and creative expressions from artists reflecting the diversity of non-men, non-binary folx, women, and all those of marginalized genders. We are particularly interested in work related to the intersectionality of gender and other identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration, age, sex, sexual and/or romantic orientation, class, and more.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our badass and wonderful judges include Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction.

All those local to New York City and nearby: join Columbia Journal staff, faculty advisors, and alums for an evening of spelling fun! Talented writers from the community will go head to head in a battle of wits. As Taylor Swift so famously sings: “Spelling is fun.”

As if sprinkling stars onto the sky
or hiding gold nuggets under the earth
I will take this lingering love and

Your memories of the museum are from your college years: visits and winter work terms when you come from Vermont and stay with the Siegels, your parents’ best friends. You feel valued, part of a family again, especially as a young woman among their three sons, always one of them in the midst of some sixties rebellion. The museum is a favorite destination. You head first to the top floor rotunda around the dome where most of the Monets are hung. There you can stand close to the paintings, examining the brush strokes, the mix of colors. But you can’t step back to see how they compose an object; you’d be in midair, three stories up. Somehow this delights you.

Ode to a Wreck
Praise to my ovaries, those broken
little bee hives busy with trying. I’m sorry

We’d been dating for only a short month and already cohabitating on Seneca Street in Tucson, when Leslie, my future wife, invited me to her family’s home, 120 miles north in Tempe, to meet her parents and to subject me to a Lutheran Christmas Eve dinner in the desert. On the approach to her house, while popping a breath mint, I noticed a sort of Arizona nativity scene on the neighbor’s roof: an inflated Santa in flowered shorts and sunglasses falling-down drunk into a fake chimney. It was very anti-Norman Rockwell-esque.

It’s a fruitful and useful thing to learn how to read like other people and those who are not like you. As each writer has a writing style, as each musician a method, a critic too, has a way of reading. Criticism done well, according to James Wood in the introduction of Serious Noticing, is bearing witness, “writing through a text,” a balance between the writerly, journalistic and scholarly.

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.

A skeleton sat in front of a café drinking coffee while he read a magazine. The magazine was called Deadly Sins Quarterly. The skeleton daydreamed about publishing his photography in the magazine. He took photos of the various realms of hell, mostly. He took a photo of Lucifer playing an acoustic guitar. He took photos of rivers of fire and clouds of smoke. He took photos of red dragons and old wizards. His photography was showcased in New York City, Paris, Mexico City, and, of course, Hell. The skeleton finished his coffee, tipped his waiter generously, and returned to the cemetery to practice yoga.