Laura Cresté (left) and Victoria Kornick (right)
LAURA CRESTÉ and VICTORIA KORNICK met a decade ago in NYU’s Creative Writing MFA, where they connected over writing long poems. They’ve been friends and readers of each other’s work ever since, including the manuscripts of what would become their first books. They exchanged questions over email about Laura’s debut collection, In the Good Years, and discussed how place, nonhuman animals, time, family history, and the unknown shaped the book.
Daniel Kraus (left) and Becky Spratford (right)
DANIEL KRAUS sat down with longtime friend and colleague BECKY SIEGEL SPRATFORD to discuss his recent Pulitzer Prize for Angel Down, reflect on an unorthodox writing career, and share his experiences adapting novels for Hollywood.
Kanchi Sharma (left) and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow (right)
KANCHI SHARMA and YU-MEI BALASINGAMCHOW first connected despite the limits of time zones – Kanchi in Mumbai, Yu-Mei in Boston. Years after seeing each other in pixels, they met in person at AWP. Bringing it full-circle, they met over Zoom to discuss Yu-Mei’s debut novel, Names Have Been Changed, its masterful portrayal of modern exiles, diaspora, concealment, and the quiet violences of bureaucracy and border.
Eve Alexandra (left) and Sarah Audsley (right)
SARAH AUDSLEY and EVE ALEXANDRA, both poets based in Vermont, share a complicated connection to the landscape and the place they call home. Each leverages the pastoral; however, both poets upend the pastoral’s tradition to explore identity, gender, familial relationships, grief, and their connection (or dislocation) to place. None of Us in White, recipient of the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize and published in 2025, is Eve Alexandra’s second poetry collection. Carl Phillips’ quotation, “Brokenness you do surprise me,” is the epigraph with which Alexandra introduces and envisions her collection as it investigates grief and reaches towards elegy with an unsettled sense of belonging.
January O’Neil (left) and Joseph O. Legaspi (right)
In the mid-90s, JOSEPH O. LEGASPI and JANUARY O’NEIL met hovering over a cheese plate at the graduate school orientation of NYU’s creative writing program. They have been friends and champions for each other ever since. On the recent release of Joseph’s third full-length collection, Amphibian, the two formally met on Zoom to discuss the book, persistence, survival, legacy, and the long arc of their friendship.
PREETI VANGANI and JENNY QI first met as inaugural Rooted and Written Fellows at the San Francisco Writers Grotto in 2019, the same year that Preeti published her debut poetry collection, Mother Tongue Apologize. Their shared experience of writing through grief after mother-loss as young women bonded them, and they became close friends. Both were subsequently awarded a Brown Handler Residency and a McCormack Writing Center Fellowship (formerly Tin House).
Talia Lakshmi Kolluri (left) and Samina Najmi (right)
SAMINA NAJMI and TALIA LAKSHMI KOLLURI first met in 2022 after Najmi read Kolluri’s short story collection What We Fed to the Manticore and conducted her own interview for The Normal School. In that conversation, they found that not only are they practically neighbors, but they share a tremendous amount of common ground. Thus, a friendship was born. This conversation unfolded over email during Najmi’s book tour for her electric memoir-in-essays, Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time, which spans her childhood in Pakistan and England, her first foray into the US in Boston, her family and professorial life, and Fresno, the place she now calls home. In this conversation, Kolluri and Najmi explore memory, return, the meaning of home, and the way we tell our stories.
DAVID EMEKA and CHUKWUEBUKA IBEH first connected in 2020, after Emeka read Ibeh’s Gerald Kraak-shortlisted story, The Ache of Longing. Emeka had raved about it to a mutual friend, who encouraged him to send Ibeh a DM. He did, and they continued messaging on Twitter about shared goals and interests. Later, Emeka was accepted into the Washington University MFA program in St. Louis, where Chukwuebuka was enrolled. Ibeh didn’t know then, but Emeka applied to the program with a story Ibeh had provided feedback on. They’ve continued to share work since, and enjoyed many adventures as well.
For this interview, Emeka and Ibeh spoke over two days when Ibeh visited St. Louis for Christmas. Their initial conversation unfolded in Ibeh’s wonderfully warm apartment, and they continued connecting over email after Ibeh’s return to Lewisburg, PA, where he currently teaches.
David Emeka (left) and Chukwuebuka Ibeh (right)
Chukwuebuka Ibeh (CI): Congratulations on your Outpost residency! How did you feel coming out of it? What was your routine like?
David Emeka (DE): Thank you so much, Ebuka. Vermont was wonderful, and the Outpost residency even more so. I keep thinking about the meals, the warmth I felt from everyone there. The grounds—the trees, the cornfields, the mountains in the distance—were spectacular. I do some of my best thinking when walking, so I’d swaddle myself in a blanket and pace among the trees, just meditating. And then there was this hammock—that was my favorite spot. When my ideas had collected to supersaturation, I’d go into the hammock and cover myself with the blanket and write. I’m a morning person, but I love to write in the dark. Every day I woke up at dawn to write, had breakfast, paced and wrote and read, jogged around the neighborhood, then returned for dinner. Sometimes we cooked for each other—I would make sourdough bread, or D’mani Thomas, the other fellow, would make tacos. We took walks under the stunning sunsets. It was a splendid time.
CI: It truly sounds beautiful. How did this process translate when you returned home?
Allison Pitinii Davis (left) and Rosanna Young Oh (right)
ALLISON PITINII DAVIS and ROSANNA YOUNG OH explore how Davis’ personal connection to Youngstown, Ohio and scholarly interest in labor inspired her debut novella, Business. They discuss representing the Rust Belt in literature, their identities as eldest daughters who worked for their family businesses, and the dignity and ethos of the working-class communities that raised them. Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of the poetry collection Line Study of a Motel Clerk , Poppy Seeds, and Business, a novella in Agency 3: Novellas . She serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Ohio State University.
Rosa Castellano (left) and Diamond Forde (right)
DIAMOND FORDE’s newest poetry collection, The Book of Alice, was the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award and was recently published by Scribner Books. Her first poetry collection, Mother Body, was a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nominee.
For this interview, Forde connected with friend and fellow poet, ROSA CASTELLANO, over Zoom. Castellano sipped coffee in Richmond, Virginia, while Forde sat in her bright office in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her dog, Oatmeal, curled at her feet. The poets discussed navigating family memories, the Bible, and Scribner selecting Forde’s manuscript during their open call for poetry manuscripts in 2023.
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