The Hurston/Wright Awards honor African American writers; Whitehead was a winner in fiction. The judges called the novel a work of “remarkable craft and imagination.”

McDermott talks about the Russian writers that inspired her Irish fiction, her relationship with the Catholic Church, and why her fiction isn't based on her real-life family - despite what readers think. 

Brown discusses why he doesn’t consider the reader when writing poetry, lessons he teaches his students, and says, “What I try to do as a poet is make the poems I wish I were reading.” 

For T Magazine’s annual “Greats” issue, Chee profiles the Korean director and a master of sex and violence in film. The two discuss the influence of James Bond films and visit the tiny, nearly empty room where Chan-wook does his writing. 

Ishion Hutchinson discusses colonized language, the self as synecdoche, and claiming the effects of catastrophe. 

“America I woke     to you at the moment/ You fell asleep I write to you from the dream,” McCrae narrates in a new poem for the Arkansas International.

The Guardian shares Vuong’s “amazing” story of his journey to poetry and talks to Vuong about why he believes “when you’re telling stories it’s very hard to hate each other.”

In an eight-part poem for Poetry, Hutchinson probes the concept of ancestry and declares, “Yes, having a gift is to be called./ Since it is given, let it go.”

Hilton Als says that Herzog’s latest play, about a mother and her disabled son, is “beautiful.” “Families rarely live up to our dream of what they should be,” Als reflects of the play's themes, and calls Mary Jane Herzog’s “most satisfying work to date.”

The New York Times reflects on writers whose work rewrite history through family sagas, including Whiting winners John Keene and Layli Long Soldier. Keene’s work in particular, the Times writes, “raises unwritten possibilities from the past’s dormant margins.”