Article Archive

“No writing is good enough until you, as an author, make a small contribution, the size of a drop, into the ocean of the world’s literature.” —Nuruddin Farah, author of North of Dawn

“Writing is a form of manual labor and should be approached in that spirit.” —Wesley Yang, author of The Souls of Yellow Folk

“I move between language, history, and worldviews—it’s always place between that gives me the most insight into my creative process.” —Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve

“What we need to do is make people less certain about their certainties.” —Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire

In this continuing series, a book critic discusses Minnesota’s thriving literary community and the importance of reviewing small-press titles.

In our third annual installment of this series, five authors over the age of fifty who published their debut books this year—Jeanne McCulloch, A. G. Lombardo, Anne Youngson, Maw Shein Win, and Laura Esther Wolfson—share their paths to publication.

A poet discusses four journals that published poems from her second collection, Instruments of the True Measure.

The first lines of a dozen new and noteworthy books, including Natasha Trethewey’s Monument: Poems New and Selected and Alice Walker’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart.