Wang's story "What Terrible Thing It Was" is featured in the anthology, edited by Roxane Gay, alongside work by Emma Cline, Curtis Sittenfeld, and more.

Lacey remarks on returning home to Mississippi and, with it, the white women who wear heels to football games and a "particular brand of Southern femininity," for The Believer. " I do not love," she writes, "the place I am obliged to call home." 

Offutt delves into his writing process, Appalachian culture, and why  "writing fiction is the best way I’ve found to quell the restlessness of my mind."

In the Guardian, Smith talks about why she "can't stop thinking about" Deana Lawson's photography, the McCarthy-era opera that is a "a powerful vehicle for these feelings of being found and seen and ratified by love," and other works of art she's been inspired by.

Tracy K. Smith discusses parallels between poetry and the Bible, such as metaphor, and says that "poetry is one of the languages that puts us in touch with our higher selves." 

Laurentiis shares their recommendations for Frank Bidart's "Ellen West," mixed media artist Devan Shimoyama, television show "Feud: Bette and Joan," and more.

In Ploughshares, an essay on the use of form in Terrance Hayes's American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins argues, "Tonally dynamic and sonically pleasing, these poems insist there’s no difference between high and low diction/culture/art, especially when you’re writing for your life." 

Sayrafiezadeh's New Yorker story explores the acting dreams of a New York construction worker, who boldly declares of his ambition,  "The more I dreamed, the more vivid the dream seemed to be, until it was no longer some faint dot situated on an improbable time line but, rather, my destiny."