By Lisa Friedlander
Yesterday in Brooklyn, NY I saw young mothers strolling their own children, and Jamaican women strolling other women’s children. Mothers and nannies walked, did errands, negotiated cease fires between siblings, bartered lollipops for patience, tickled and explained the teaming stimuli of the surround. I thought of the ease with which people, beginning as strangers to… Read more »
By Jennifer Jean
For over two years I’ve been researching and writing a poetry collection about sex-trafficking and objectification issues in America. When I give poetry readings there is always at least one person, if not more, from the audience who comes up to me and asks: “Why are you writing about this issue?” What I’ve discovered is,… Read more »
By Christine Hale
In the days since the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, I’ve been mostly silent, watching my mouth, and my mind, while others speak. I’ve felt the need to speak, because I certainly have feelings about what happened: rage and despair about the virulence of racism in this country. But I’ve had to think… Read more »
By Danielle Monroe
I feel for Rachel Dolezal. I really do. When the strange saga broke and blanketed the news I couldn’t help but identify with her a little. It’s the story of a woman who craves acceptance from a community she doesn’t belong to, goes to extremes to find it, and inevitably goes too far. It’s a… Read more »
By January Gill O'Neil
June was quite a month for race relations in the United States. Hard to believe at the beginning of the month we were talking about the pool party in McKinney, Texas, where officers were called to a scene that quickly intensified and turned into chaos. Next, we talked (at length) about Rachel Dolezal, the woman… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
KA: First, congratulations on winning the 2015 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. I know you’ve won several other awards as well. How does getting this kind of recognition affect your writing or sense of yourself as a poet? BS: This is an interesting question because certainly winning an award is a boost to confidence, and… Read more »
By David Fox
DF: In your craft essay “One Story, Two Narrators” included in the anthology SolLit Selects, you talk about how many personal essays and memoirs fall short, because they fail to create an internal narrative to accompany the surface-level events. Why do you think that so many aspiring nonfiction writers struggle with this? Also, you give some examples… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
MT: Your story “0=1” was the Fiction First Runner-up for SolLit Magazine’s Annual Lit Contest in 2013. Now the story appears in SolLit Selects: Diverse Voices, the magazine’s first print anthology. Congratulations! Could you tell us what inspired you to write this story? EG: The story was inspired by experience, and in fact is so close to… Read more »
By Rebecca Hart Olander
I Carry My Mother by Lesléa Newman, Headmistress Press, 2015, 108 pp/, $10.00 Lesléa Newman’s latest book, I Carry My Mother takes as its subject the death of the author’s mother and the process of grieving this loss. In this unflinching, layered account, Newman opens a window on a human experience deeply her own… Read more »
By Pablo Medina
City of Eternal Spring by Afaa Michael Weaver, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014, 96pp/, $15.95 City of Eternal Spring confirms what I felt when I first started reading Afaa Michael Weaver’s poems about ten years ago. He is a master poet who is comfortable in his craft at the same time that he takes… Read more »
By Alison Stone
Otherwise Unseeable by Betsy Sholl, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, 78pp/, $16.95 Betsy Sholl’s seventh book offers a world of contradictions, the friction of disparate and contradictory objects and experiences struggling to coexist. The first poem, “Genealogy,” begins, “One of her parents was a flame, the other a rope.” Odd juxtapositions continue with… Read more »
By Barbara Blatner
A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea by Denise Bergman, winner of the West End Press 2013 Patricia Clark Smith Poetry Prize, West End Press, 2014, 72pp/, $14.95 The subtle, fierce poems in Denise Bergman’s new collection, A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea, offer a biography of the Statue of Liberty, beginning with… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
MT: Your short story “The Edge” is included in SolLit Selects: Diverse Voices, the magazine’s first print anthology. Congratulations! Could you tell us what inspired you to write this story? JS: I’m fairly sure Russell Banks’s “Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story” was the initial inspiration for “The Edge.” It’s been many years since… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Your essay “The Coverless Book” won our nonfiction contest last year and is also included in SolLit Selects: Diverse Voices –our first print anthology. It’s a beautifully crafted essay in which you explore your brother Daniel’s death, which followed a number of suicide attempts, by using excerpts from a notebook of his you found after… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Your Guide to All Things SolLit at #AWP15! Visit us at booth 409 at the bookfair with our friends from Talking Writing! We’ll be selling copies of our brand new anthology SolLit Selects:Diverse Voices. Thursday April 9 4 to 6pm Kiernan’s Irish Pub Poet’s Corner, 85 6th Street New Rivers Press Book Launch & Readings Come hear… Read more »
By Kristyn Bacon
Since I’ve started traveling and living abroad, I’ve developed a growing appreciation for foreign words in English text. While I enjoy the occasional italicized vocabulary, I love reading sentences and dialogue in a foreign language, even one that I don’t understand. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway practiced this regularly in their work. Both lived and… Read more »
By Lee Hope
The following is a conversation between SolLit Editor in Chief Lee Hope and Nonfiction Editor Richard Hoffman. Richard is author of the Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise, Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2008 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club, and Emblem. A fiction… Read more »
By Laura Eppinger
2015: My Year of Re-Reads Every year I try to read 52 books in 52 weeks. This has been my New Year’s Resolution for more than a decade, and most years, I’ve kept it. I love to devour fiction and poetry, and so far, I have read something new each week. This year, however, I… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
There is a belief that writing is a solitary act and in moments, I don’t disagree that it is. There are many times, as a writer, where I have had to shut myself off from the rest of the world and delve deep inside my mind to pull out the words that were bouncing around… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
“When a writer is born into a family, the family is doomed,” -Czesław Miłosz I write a lot about family, my father in particular. You might say I’m obsessed with him. Not in the way I was obsessed with him as a child, when I was a daddy’s girl. Then he was simply larger… Read more »
By Lee Hope
In celebration of Black History Month, we are honored to share the work of many celebrated African American and Black authors who have contributed to our magazine over the years. We thank you for your voice, your work, and your willingness to share your pieces with us. Contributors to Solstice (alphabetical order by first… Read more »
By Mariya Taher
There is no denial that for a writer, words are the strongest tool in our possession. We have a kinship with language and the words we use to describe our feelings and thoughts. We understand the weight of words, the difference, sometimes subtle, between similar words such as hit and strike, or lean and thin.… Read more »
By Theri Pickens
Diana Abu-Jaber’s has been heralded as a writer that “gets it just right” and whose work “leaves readers breathless” (DianaAbuJaber.com). This well-deserved praise comes as the result of her award-winning style, captured in one food memoir, The Language Of Baklava (2007), and four novels: Arabian Jazz (1993), Crescent (2003), Origin (2007), and Birds of Paradise… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Margaret Elysia Garcia lives in the northern Sierra Nevadas with her family in exile from her Los Angeles roots. A contributing editor for Hip Mama Magazine, she also writes a comic zine called “The Adventures of Sadgirl the Superheroine,” illustrated by her daughter, Paloma. In 2014, she wrote, co-directed and co-produced the play “Before… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Whenever we can, we like to bring you news of helpful resources for writers, and here’s an innovative resource we just learned about: Writer’s Infusion is an internet show designed to bring the experience and support of a writer’s group to the writing community, for free. It’s the the brainchild of Susan Zall (that’s her… Read more »
By Leonard Kress
Who but the Maenads, repentant, clothed, and in their right minds. (from Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion) For a long time I’ve been searching for a way to describe my own poetic process that also explains what takes place inside me when I read certain poems. As far as… Read more »
By Cassandra Capewell
Being an English major combines many of the things in life that I enjoy deep down to my core: I love reading, which is nice because most of my assignments are lengthy portions of text. I love writing, both creatively and academically, so hunkering down to bang out an eight-page paper, if I have enough… Read more »
By Amy Yelin
Yesterday I got a letter from AWP attempting to win me back as a Writer’s Chronicle subscriber (I have no excuse except that I forgot to renew). Inside the envelope was a solicitation letter. And this bookmark: My first thought upon reading this bookmark was: Right on Joan! Potential bottomless pit of potential humiliation!… Read more »
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