Tag: Interview

In Conversation with 2015 Fiction Contest Winner Shanyn Fiske

In Conversation with 2015 Fiction Contest Winner Shanyn Fiske

By Wendy Pierman Mitzel   

Wendy: Why did you decide to submit “Calligraphy,” your winning piece, to the contest? Did you see it as a good fit for Solsticelitmag and our diverse voices theme?  Shanyn: “Calligraphy” is one piece from a collection of related stories that I’m currently writing. The collection focuses on the four Yu daughters as they grow… Read more »


In Conversation with Michelle Blake

In Conversation with Michelle Blake

By David Fox   

David: At one point in your contest-winning essay “A Fable for Our Times”, you write, “The call for change did not die, but its message often seemed lost amid the static roar of greed and violence that filled the next forty years, until new leaders again stirred the conscience of the nation.” As someone who… Read more »


An Interview with Poetry Contest Winner Alysia Nicole Harris

An Interview with Poetry Contest Winner Alysia Nicole Harris

By Ben Berman   

You are currently pursuing a PhD in linguistics at Yale. In what ways do you see overlap between your work as a linguist and as a poet? In what ways do you see these as distinctly separate fields?  My linguistic work and my poetic career are both sourced in the same love of language. I… Read more »


An Interview with Martha Collins

An Interview with Martha Collins

By Danielle Legros Georges   

Martha Collins is a poet, translator, the editor-at-large for Field Magazine, and an editor at Oberlin College Press. She is the author of the poetry volumes, Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2014), White Papers (Pitt Poetry Series, 2012), Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006), Some Things Words Can Do (Sheep Meadow, 1998), A History of a Small Life on a Windy Planet (University of Georgia, 1993), The Arrangement of Space (Gibbs Smith,… Read more »


A Conversation with Poet & Teacher Natasha Sajé

A Conversation with Poet & Teacher Natasha Sajé

By Amy Yelin   

How did you come to poetry? I wrote animal stories as a child. In seventh and eighth grade classes, I’d read Tennyson and Poe, but then my friend Catherine Patterson sent me Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Poems not in a textbook—and by a woman! I was hooked. In college at the University of Virginia, I took… Read more »


Talking Creative Nonfiction with Michael Steinberg

Talking Creative Nonfiction with Michael Steinberg

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 »


Chatting with Author Elizabeth Gonzalez

Chatting with Author Elizabeth Gonzalez

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 »


A Conversation with José Skinner

A Conversation with José Skinner

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 »


An Interview with Last Year’s Nonfiction Contest Winner, Mary Collins

An Interview with Last Year’s Nonfiction Contest Winner, Mary Collins

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 »


Five Questions for Richard Hoffman: On Memory, Race and Family

Five Questions for Richard Hoffman: On Memory, Race and Family

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 »


7 Questions: An Interview with Marianne Leone

7 Questions: An Interview with Marianne Leone

By Amy Yelin   

Marianne  Leone’s essay “The Official Story” is a Featured Nonfiction piece in the fall issue. She is an actress, screenwriter, and essayist. Her essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in the Boston Globe, The Bark magazine, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti blog. She had a recurring role on HBO’s The Sopranos and has appeared in films by John Sayles, Martin Scorsese, Nancy Savoca, Michael… Read more »