“I successfully avoided husbands and children and day jobs—those things can all really interfere with your productivity.” In an interview with Emma Watson, Rebecca Solnit discusses how she has managed to write so prolifically, the communication of information as a cultural phenomenon, and the themes in her first memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence (Viking, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 1981 Brockport Writers Forum interview, June Jordan reads “A Poem about Intelligence for my Brothers and Sisters,” and speaks about how she came to poetry and fell in love with “the possibility of language.”

“It’s a story that stands by itself, I just had to type it.” In this interview, Isabel Allende speaks about her new novel, A Long Petal of the Sea (Ballantine Books, 2020), and her history and friendship with Book Passage founder and president Elaine Petrocelli. A Long Petal of the Sea is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this PBS Books interview at the 2019 AWP Conference & Book Fair, Keith S. Wilson speaks about his love of video games, Affrilachian poetry, and his debut collection, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Wilson is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I hope that people can take away that these racial biases, these class biases, exist harmoniously within really kind gestures and authentic love for someone.” In this video, Kiley Reid talks about the characters in her debut novel, Such a Fun Age (Putnam, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We like to think about people and nature as two separate things,” says Richard Powers speaking about his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory (Norton, 2018), in this PBS NewsHour interview. “This book is precisely a book that challenges that notion of human separatism.” For more Powers, read “A Talk in the Woods: Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers” from the November/December 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I got into the habit of writing very, very, very quickly,” says Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy and the essay collection, Coventry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), about taking long breaks from writing to live a normal life and the experience of being a mother to young children without the time to make notes. “I had to hold things and then find an opportunity to express them.”

“If we truly love a place and are tethered to a place, then it’s our job to get to know that place.” In this Good Morning America interview, Sarah M. Broom speaks about her debut memoir, The Yellow House (Grove Press, 2019), which is a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction.

“It’s really hard to inhabit the mind of another,” says Isabella Hammad, author of The Parisian (Grove Press, 2019), about the difficulties and joys of writing fiction in this Louisiana Channel interview. “You use your emotional experience, you use your literal experience, you use the experience of others you know to access imaginatively another subjectivity.”

“It’s a book about a rap group, but, more particularly, a book that is examining how fandom seeps into our lives.” In this PBS NewHour video, Hanif Abdurraqib speaks with Amna Nawaz about his memoir, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019), and the ways in which music intertwines with identity and the poignant moments in our lives.