Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: Camille Rankine beautifully writes that you “interrogate the very notion of beauty, its construction within a white supremacist world, and the how the cages our culture has built of it can hold us captive within our own minds.” In Colton Behavioral Therapy, you’ve created a world of both always and never where these impossible, conflicting, and toxic societal standards of gender and identity are imposed, and at the very least, self-enforced. Do you thin

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: A Thirst for Salt is a love letter to someone lost and the pleasure of beginnings. What I found so interesting was the insight into the lover, the “you.” There’s a context and history given to her that we are so rarely privy to when the “I” is suffering. The book questions our ability to have something or someone “forever”—maybe even the value of it. Can you talk to us about permanence (or lack thereof) and how it functions in this work? Hannah Leffingw

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: This book is a beautiful meditation on gender expression as deception, threat, protection, absolution, violence, and condemnation. Please tell us about the process of researching and choosing these specific stories to tell. Why was it important for you to tell these stories? Fox Frazier-Foley: Thank you so much for your kind words about my work, Sarah. I’m honored to be having a conversation with you—about my work, and about feminism, theology, and myth

Sarah Marcus-Donnelly: Your gorgeous new book, How to Prove a Theory, was the 2017 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize Winner. It is a meditation on grief and memory and human resilience. I have had the pleasure of listening to you read some of these poems, which made them even more tender and devastating for me. Can you tell us about the process of writing about grief? How long did it take you to write the collection? Can you share some background for this book? Nicole Tong: Sarah, th

Kate Partridge: A Woman Alone was selected as the winner of the Gazing Grain Press Prose Chapbook Contest this summer by judge Lily Hoang. Can you tell us a bit about how this collection of short pieces took this form as a chapbook manuscript? Is this a component of a longer work? Nora Boydston: These stories began as completely unrelated pieces and were written over a period of a few years while I was living in New York City. After I finished the MFA program at The New Schoo

Sarah Marcus: I think readers can relate to the beautiful anxiety and obsessive self-reflection in so many of your poems. In the poem, "How To Piss in Public and Maintain Femininity," you write: "...I want what I want/ regardless of social etiquette and the way/ I am ashamed of my unconscious by which I mean/ I say everything out loud in other words/ I never fucking learn my lesson." Should we ever learn our fucking lesson? Is it worth it? Would we gain or lose our empathy? M

Kate Partridge: Big Brown Bag takes its title from the iconic Bloomingdale’s shopping bags, which have those words printed on the side. Why begin with that image as a title? Marisa Crawford: Hmmmmmm. The poems in this chapbook are in large part about, and/or written in response to, the difficulties and weirdnesses and tensions that come out of having a day job at a corporation, which I do, and have for the past nearly ten years. I think the image of the shopping bag and the p

Kate Partridge: Your chapbook Sweet/Crude, which we're delighted to be publishing in 2016, responds to the impact of fracking and the ensuing population boom in North Dakota. The work parses many of the impacts of this “boom or bust,” including the dimensions of violence that have followed—not only ecological, but also public and domestic damage to women, children, safe housing, public safety, and Native Americans. The book is also highly associative, though, and makes intrig

Sarah Marcus: You serve on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. How and why did you get involved with VIDA? From the perspective of being both a teacher and a writer, what relevance do you think VIDA holds for our current literary landscape? What do you think people who identify as inclusive feminists can do to further the cause? Metta Sáma: When Cate Marvin, Ann Townsend & Erin Belieu founded VIDA (née WILA), I was deeply interested in being part of a

Sarah Marcus: You are one of the founding editors for HER KIND, an online literary community powered by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. The New York Times has said that “since it began several years ago, the VIDA count has been a reliable conversation-starter about gender disparity in the literary world.” How did you get involved with VIDA, and how did this initial blog come to be? Is there overlap in purpose and message with your work as a Kore Biters columnist at Kore Pre