The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets
Ten debut poets who published in 2024 generously share the inspiration, advice, and writers block remedies that have sustained them through their literary journeys.
Tags:
Article Archive
Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
Reflection: Twenty Years of Debut Poets
Since 2005, Poets & Writers Magazine has highlighted emerging poets in an annual feature on first poetry books. In celebration, we gathered a list of the 222 poets and their debut collections that have graced our pages.
Tags:
Ten Questions for Lily Tuck
“I studied with Gordon Lish and he once said: ‘Never explain, never complain.’” —Lily Tuck, author of The Rest Is Memory
Tags:
Revision Strategies: Endings
The author of Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America (Little A, 2021) offers advice on how to approach editing the endings of essays.
Tags:
Ten Questions for Bruce Bond
“All good poems are love poems.” —Bruce Bond, author of The Dove of the Morning News
Tags:
Revision Strategies: Beginnings
The author of Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America (Little A, 2021) offers advice on how to approach editing the beginnings of books and essays.
Tags:
Ten Questions for Juhea Kim
“Describe your inner vision clearly so that the reader can see exactly what you see.” —Juhea Kim, author of City of Night Birds
Tags:
Ten Questions for Jessie van Eerden
“I found the creation of cohesion challenging; essays are disparate things, yet the book needs to make a whole.”—Jessie van Eerden, author of Yoke and Feather
Tags:
Lessons From Cinema: Writing Young Protagonists
The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) considers what films can teach us about writing adolescent characters.
Tags:
Ten Questions for Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and Rachel Britton
This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Brynja Hjálmsdóttir and Rachel Britton, the author and translator of A Woman Looks Over Her Shoulder / Kona lítur við.
Tags:
Lessons From Cinema: Blurring the Line Between Magical Realism and Metaphor
The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) applies lessons in magical realism and metaphor from film to fiction.
Tags:
Lessons From Cinema: How Scriptwriting Saved My Novel
The author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, October 2024) contemplates how lessons in screenwriting can be applied to fiction.
Tags:
Ten Questions for Sharon Wahl
“Do a lot of people feel this monogamous guilt in their writing lives?”—Sharon Wahl, author of Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances
Tags:
Ten Questions for Mike Fu
“Streamline. Outline. Find your center of gravity.” —Mike Fu, author of Masquerade
Tags:
Ten Questions for Miller Oberman
“[T]herapeutic modes can enhance artistic work enormously, because they give us access to our inner workings in fresh, sometimes even revelatory ways. ” —Miller Oberman, author of Impossible Things
Tags:
Submitting and Publishing Hybrid Work
The author of The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain offers advice on submitting and publishing hybrid work.
Tags:
Ten Questions for Kimiko Hahn
“You can go with intention, or you can explore where the poem leads you. Where your unconscious leads you.” —Kimiko Hahn, author of The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems
Tags:
The Definition of Poetry: An Interview With Mosab Abu Toha
For Mosab Abu Toha, whose entire life and body of work, including his new collection, Forest of Noise, have been shaped by war, poetry is a way for all of us to document, to try to understand, and to act in times of suffering.
Tags:
5 Over 50: 2024
Excerpts from debut books by Suzette Mullen, Dorsía Smith Silva, Uchenna Awoke, Deborah Jackson Taffa, and Parul Kapur.
Tags:
Book Drop Nourishes Native Youth
This past April, NDN Girls Book Club loaded up a big pink truck to distribute over ten thousand free books and care packages throughout the Hopi Reservation and Navajo Nation, improving accessibility to Indigenous literature.
Tags:
Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin
The first lines of a dozen noteworthy books, including Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems by A. B. Spellman and The Charterhouse of Padma by Padma Viswanathan.
Tags:
The Lynx Watch Fights Book Bans
Led by best-selling author Lauren Groff, the Lynx Watch helps distribute books banned or challenged in the state of Florida to local readers and works with advocacy organizations to bring awareness to other threatened freedoms.
Tags:
New Small Press Incubator Fellowship
The Center for Book Arts’s new fellowship program supports BIPOC creatives with essential resources to start a small press, planting seeds for a more diverse and equitable vision of publishing.
Tags:
Small Press Points: New Michigan Press
“Take pleasure in publishing work you love,” says Ander Monson, founder of New Michigan Press. Steered by this guidance and a taste for the off-kilter, the press has produced chapbooks and the magazine Diagram for over twenty years.
Tags:
Literary MagNet: Brittany Rogers
The author of the debut poetry collection Good Dress highlights a thoughtful selection of literary journals that helped shepherd her poems into the world, including Underbelly and Hopkins Review.
Tags: