With MAI NARDONE
Your name: Mai Nardone
Current city or town: Bangkok
How long have you lived here: Fourteen years plus one this time around
MELODY NIXON interviews CATHY LINH CHE
Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split, winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, the 2015 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2016 Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Che is a Vietnamese American poet and teacher, originally from Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Poets House, and The Asian American Literary Review, among many others. Her poems have been published in Hyperallergic, Hyphen, poets.org, and AAWW’s The Margins. Her work delicately probes the liminal spaces between cultures, identities, nationalities, and bodies.
With ANTTI TUOMAINEN
One of Antti Tuomainen’s favorite places in Helsinki is the beautiful Kaivopuisto park and the Baltic shore on the southernmost tip of downtown Helsinki, pictured here on a December morning.
Your name: Antti Tuomainen
Current city or town: Helsinki, Finland
How long have you lived here: 44 years
JULIA LICHTBLAU interviews FATOU KEÏTA
On a recent trip to Côte d’Ivoire, I walked into the Librairie de France, the crowded, chaotic bookstore on the Plateau, the downtown business district of Abidjan, and asked for books by Fatou KeÏta. They directed me upstairs, where I found most of a bookcase filled by the popular Ivoirian writer’s works. Fatou Keita has written 25 books for children and two novels, including Rebelle (Rebel), about a young West African woman who escapes genital excision, which remains common, despite efforts to eradicate the practice. According to a 2013 World Bank report, “To Be a Woman in Côte d’Ivoire,” 14% percentage of Ivoirian girls under 14 have experienced infibulation, the most traumatizing form of genital excision.
S. TREMAINE NELSON interviews ELIZABETH A. I. POWELL
Born in New York City, Elizabeth A. I. Powell is a Vermont-based poet and editor in chief of the Green Mountains Review. She is the author of two poetry collections: The Republic of Self and, most recently, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Alaska Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Ploughshares, and many other eminent publications.
With ANGELA PALM
Your name: Angela Palm
Current city or town: Burlington, Vermont
How long have you lived here: Five years
SARETTA MORGAN interviews YOUMNA CHLALA
Youmna Chlala was born in Beirut and is currently based in New York City. Her work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through video, drawing, books, installation, and performance. She was recently an Open Sessions artist at The Drawing Center and a resident artist at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center’s Process Space. Her work has been widely exhibited at spaces that include Art Dubai Projects; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Camera Austria; Art in General, New York; and San Jose Museum of Art. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals. Chlala is the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art and recipient of a Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Her poetry book, The Paper Camera, will be published by Litmus Press in 2017.
Saretta Morgan met with Chlala at McNally Jackson Books in SoHo, New York City, in the late spring of 2016 to talk about relationships, speculation and space.
With DAGOBERTO GILB
Austin Texas Lake Front
In this month’s Ask A Local, Dagoberto Gilb offers us a glimpse of Austin, TX in the form of a micro-interview.
Your name: Dagoberto Gilb
Current city or town: Austin, Texas
How long have you lived here? 15 years
With ALICE BURDICK
Your name: Alice Burdick
Current city or town: Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia
How long have you lived here: I’ve lived in Mahone Bay since 2008, so eight years, and just outside Lunenburg for five years before that. I moved to Halifax in 2002 and lived there for around a year, after growing up in Toronto and mainly living there, but also in Espanola Ontario and British Columbia—in Vancouver and near Roberts Creek.
HILARY LEICHTER interviews HELEN PHILLIPS
Helen Phillips was born and raised in Colorado. She is the author of four books, most recently the short story collection Some Possible Solutions. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, and a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her collection And Yet They Were Happy was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. Helen has received numerous awards, including a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, The Iowa Review Nonfiction Award, the DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Award, and a Ucross Foundation residency. She is an assistant professor at Brooklyn College.
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