In the video below, you can watch my recent conversation with Saida Agostini, poet and President of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, about her new book, let the dead in (Alan Squire, 2022). It is a book deeply rooted in Black Queer female Guyanese American experiences, which, in this instance, translates into poems of magic, family, […]
Editorial Note: Isabella Sanchez interviewed Celia Lisset Alvarez for my Poetry Writing II course at The University of Tampa in Spring 2021. I find their conversation incredibly engaging and meaningful, and I’m grateful for them allowing me to share it here. Isa wrote the following introduction. Cuban American scholar and poet Celia Lisset Alvarez is […]
Editorial Note: In the Fall 2020 semester, Barbara Jane Reyes visited (by zoom) my class on Poetic Forms at the University of Tampa to talk about her latest book of poems, Letters to a Young Brown Girl—which, I believe, we were the first class ever to read. After our class conversation, Reyes generously sent me […]
We read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli in my World Literature course in the spring of 2019. This piercing little book narrates her experience volunteering to translate for lawyers who are volunteering to help process asylum applications for child refugees from Central America who have arrived unaccompanied in […]
I talked with Emily Jungmin Yoon (@EmilyYoon), poet, translator, and doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, about her latest book, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets—a tiny anthology of translations just out from Axis Press as part of a series on “Translating Feminisms.” Our conversation began by considering two related statements Yoon makes […]
Ravi Shankar’s just-published book The Many Uses of Mint presents new and selected poems from twenty years of his writing, including from the Norton anthology he co-edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. The poet Lisa Pegram and I recently sat down with Ravi over video chat to […]
In the video below, I chat with Patricia Roberts-Miller, PhD, about her recent book Demagoguery and Democracy. Although as a scholar of rhetoric or specifically “of train wrecks in public deliberation,” Roberts-Miller has written a number of academic tomes (and in fact has a scholarly version of this one forthcoming), she wrote this as a little […]
I want to begin with joy and enthusiasm. But I always feel ambivalent when giving students advice about grad school in English. The thing is, I don’t know if you should go. I don’t want to push you in the wrong direction. You might benefit from it as much as I have. In my eight […]
Many people do not realize that Jesus was quoting directly from the Book of Leviticus when he said to love one’s neighbors as oneself. This context lends an important layer of meaning to his words. Often his saying is reduced to an encouragement to “be nice” to others. While not a bad admonish as far as it goes, that interpretation […]
Corrigan Literary Review 