The authors discuss their writing practice and the poems featured in our Winter 2017 issue:
On collaboration:
We met in an online class at UCLA. Our differing poems about girlhood wounds spoke deeply to one another. We kept in touch …
her breath became my breath — Alicia Elkort and Jennifer Givhan in conversation
Alicia Elkort’s poetry has been published in AGNI, Arsenic Lobster, Elsewhere Lit, Heron Tree, Menacing Hedge, Rogue Agent, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and many others. She was named a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Book Prize in 2015. She lives in California and will go to great lengths for an honest cup of black tea and a cool breeze.
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American writer and activist from the southwestern desert and the author of three prize-winning poetry collections: Girl with Death Mask (Indiana University Press/Indiana Review’s Blue Light Books, 2017), Protection Spell (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), and Landscape with Headless Mama (Pleiades Press, 2015). Her honors include an NEA fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, and the Frost Place Latin@ scholarship, among others, and her work has appeared in publications including Best New Poets, Ploughshares, Poetry, Boston Review, AGNI, and Kenyon Review. She is editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and teaches at The Poetry Barn and Western New Mexico University.