author of eleven books, most recently The Mountains Sing, published in 2020 by Algonquin Books. Growing up in Vietnam, I was discouraged to read literary works by those who fled our country after the war, since they were branded as “traitors.” It too

WHEN I set out to write a book about loneliness, I imagined it would be easy. Loneliness seemed simple: It was a bad feeling, but it was also romantic in some way, a problem that novels and movies had trained me to believe was an intellectual one tha

author or coauthor of nine books, including Boundless, published in 2017 by Drawn & Quarterly. Lee Lai is a cartoonist who centers bodies: how they are held, the space between them, the way they touch and are touched. Bodies communicate as much as wo

Feedback from readers I feel such gratitude and admiration for two articles from the Literary Life department of the May/June 2021 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Both Sarah Ruhl’s “Not Writing Right Now: Writer’s Block During a Pandemic” and J.T.

Before teaching under-graduate courses in children’s and young adult literature in the English department at the University of Arizona, Stephanie Pearmain was a reader for the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. “I have an MFA in creative writing,” says Pe

IF THERE is one milestone in a writing career capable of launching a thousand daydreams and anxieties at once, it’s when a literary agent calls to discuss representation. Known among writers as simply “the call,” this phone conversation could potenti

author of two novels, most recently The Tenth Muse, published by Ecco in 2019. I read Pik-Shuen Fung’s evocative debut novel, Ghost Forest, with a combination of wonder and gratitude: wonder at how it manages to feel both expansive and rich, and grat

This spring, writer Susan Tacent co-taught a virtual workshop called The Art and Science of Migration to twelve writers interested in animal migratory patterns. By the last of the workshop’s five weekly sessions, Tacent says, students saw migration e

On March 25, Poets & Writers hosted its first-ever virtual gala, “In Celebration of Writers.” The star-studded event featured special guest Oprah Winfrey, recipient of Poets & Writers’ Leadership Award, in conversation with authors Cheryl Strayed and

When I met Anthony at St anford in 2014, he declared that he would become a famous fiction writer, even though he had never written fiction before, at least not in a serious way. He was the coeditor in chief of Stanford’s humor magazine, the Chaparra