Author: Scott LaClaire

No Stories

By David Hayden
From the Fall 2020 Issue

Kenny avoided prison after school.

“It’s a horrible little planet,” he said.

The drugs were hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of William James’s Principles of Psychology (unabridged). Carlos stole the book. Carlos was interested in psychology. He threw away the …

David Hayden

David Hayden was born in Ireland and lives in England. His writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Granta Online, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Dublin Review, AGNI, and A Public Space. His work has also appeared in the anthology Being Various: New Irish Writing (Faber, 2019), edited by Lucy Caldwell, and has aired on BBC and RTÉ radio. His first book, Darker with the Lights on, was published by Transit Books in 2017.

Invisible Woman: A Reflection on Being Seen in America

By Melanie P. Moore
From the Fall 2020 Issue
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Melanie P. Moore is a writer living in Austin, Texas. A graduate of the University of Georgia with an MA from Georgia State University, she was previously the founder and executive director of Badgerdog Literary Publishing, where, with a talented team and key community support, she started Austin’s first writers-in-the-schools program (now a program of the Austin Public Library Friends Foundation) and re-launched American Short Fiction after acquiring the defunct journal from the University of Texas Press in 2003. “Invisible Woman” was taken from her current project, a memoir traversing sexuality, spirituality, and illness.

Listening to the Thrush: Notes toward the Greening of Poetry in a Time of Global Climate Change

By Margaret Gibson
From the Fall 2020 Issue
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Margaret Gibson is the current poet laureate of Connecticut and the author of twelve books of poems, all from Louisiana State University Press, most recently Not Hearing the Wood Thrush (2018) and The Glass Globe (forthcoming in 2021), as well as a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). The Vigil (1993) was a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry; Broken Cup (2016) was a finalist for the Poets’ Prize, and its title poem won a Pushcart Prize that year. Gibson is professor emerita at the University of Connecticut.

Teaching Ecopoetry in a Time of Climate Change

By Craig Santos Perez
From the Fall 2020 Issue

I arranged ten desks in a circle in preparation for students the first day of my undergraduate poetry workshop. It was fall 2011—my first semester teaching in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. The students filed in, …

Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the co-editor of five anthologies and the author of five books of poetry, most recently Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn, 2020). He is a professor in the English department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.

Dreaming the World: Vinod Kumar Shukla’s Extraordinary Sentences

By Vidyan Ravinthiran
From the Fall 2020 Issue
Vinod Kumar Shukla. Photo by Shashwat Gopal.

What do you do—as a critic—when you encounter a writer so gladdeningly cajoling, so sweetly weird that you’re convinced anyone who read him deeply and carefully would be delighted; but who also, stylistically, can be studiously bizarre in a way …

Vidyan Ravinthiran

Vidyan Ravinthiran teaches at Harvard and is the author of two poetry collections from Bloodaxe Books, The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019) and Grun-tu-molani (2014), and the monograph Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell University Press, 2015).

College (translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai)

By Vinod Kumar Shukla
From the Fall 2020 Issue
Vinod Kumar Shukla. Photo by Shashwat Gopal.

We were in the last year of college. My younger brother was in the first year. All my free time went in going around the bazaar. It had become a habit. I quite enjoyed it. In college, in the evening, …

Vinod Kumar Shukla

Vinod Kumar Shukla is a poet and writer whose works in Hindi have been translated into Italian, Swedish, German, and French. His most recent titles published in English include A Window Lived in the Wall (Westland, 2019) and The Windows in Our House Are Little Doors: A Novel in Twenty-Six Stories (HarperCollins, 2019), both translated by Satti Khanna; and Blue Is Like Blue: Stories (Harper Perennial, 2019), translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai. Among Shukla’s many honors, Blue Is Like Blue won the 2019 Atta Galatta–Bangalore Literature Festival Book Prize in fiction and was named the Mathrubhumi Book of the Year in 2020. The Servant’s Shirt, translated by Khanna (Penguin, 1999), was adapted into the film Naukar ki kameez (1999) by Mani Kaul. 

Watch Night: An Extended Public Service Announcement

Video poem by Terrance Hayes, directed by Radiclani Clytus

On the eve of the 157th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, National Book Award–winning poet Terrance Hayes collaborated with RoundO Films to reflect on the historical realities that preserve the Lowcountry …

on Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

From the Summer 2020 Issue

The title of poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s memoir about intergenerational migration derives from mythical insects that are said to inhabit the mountains of Mexico, tiny creatures with incandescent bodies and the faces of children. In Castillo’s telling, los Niños de …

on The Prime Anniversary by Jay Wright

By Michael Berlin
From the Summer 2020 Issue

Jay Wright’s new collection, The Prime Anniversary, begins with a wedding song for the lost. Borrowing from the Sapphic fragment ὦ καλή, ὦ χαρίεσσα (“o beautiful, o graceful”), its epigraph apostrophizes absence and begins a ceremony whose actors wait …

Michael Berlin is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is currently writing his dissertation with the support of the Donald A. Strauss Foundation, the Michael J. Connell Foundation at the Huntington Library, and the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at the William A. Clark Memorial Library. His work is forthcoming in Cultural Critique.