Reimagining Place: Setting as Convergence
Something useful that writers can do when setting fiction in a real place is to leave. Choosing projects that allow us to write about a place after we’ve moved away…
Q&A: Jenny Molberg of Ploughshares
Emerson College recently named Jenny Molberg editor in chief of Ploughshares, the celebrated quarterly journal that has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, for more than fifty years. Molberg, the author…
The Written Image: A Radical Alteration, Women’s Studio Workshop
A Radical Alteration: Women’s Studio Workshop as a Sustainable Model for Art Making, a new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., celebrates the…
Writers Mix Movies and Memoir
It can sometimes feel like films narrate our lives. “Everyone has a movie that has mattered to them in their life,” says writer and editor Ryan W. Bradley, who selfishly “wanted…
Arts Funding in Peril
This spring the Trump administration walloped the arts community when it slashed federal funding for literary arts and culture, taking major steps to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA),…
The Sad Tale of the Soft Sale: How Book Returns Work and Why You Should Care
Publishers that use print on demand (POD), meanwhile, see lower financial impacts from book returns. Ingram’s POD services, IngramSpark and Lightning Source, for instance, allow publishers to opt for returned…
Agents & Editors: Nicole Aragi
From the May/June 2025 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine
The Ungrateful Stranger: Whose Story Deserves Welcome?
On a spring evening in 2016, the day after Donald Trump won a series of primaries cementing his candidacy, I stepped into a hushed auditorium in midtown Manhattan and found…
The LGBTQ+ Literary Resistance
In November 2024, PEN America released its key findings from over ten thousand documented cases of book bans that occurred in the 2023–2024 school year: Thirty-nine percent of reported books…
Writers With Day Jobs: Earning a Living Outside of Literature
In 2018, as a younger writer in a different phase of life, I was thrilled to interview prolific author William Vollmann. A digital magazine employed me at the time, but…