Interviews | The Iowa Review

TIR Editor Interview Series: Nicole Migneault

Nicole Migneault

Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate student and poetry co-editor Nicole Migneault answers a few questions about editing and poetry.

In your view, what’s the most important thing an editor should do, or read for when reviewing submissions?

Poems with a sense of urgency, emotional honesty, and ideally a singular approach to writing intrigue me. I think it’s important as an editor to uplift work that is immersive and holds me in the space of the poem with its unique sensibilities, specificity and attention to the line.

Interview with Daisy Hernández

Victor Resendiz

Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, which won the 2022 PEN /Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. Daisy is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Northwestern University. TIR intern Victor Resendiz talked with Hernández via email about " Soursop," her story in issue 51/2 of The Iowa Review, and The Kissing Bug.

Interview with David Shields

Cassandra Jensen

Writer and filmmaker David Shields has authored twenty-two books, including the groundbreaking Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Vintage Books, 2010) and the award-winning Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), as well as, most recently, The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power (Mad Creek Books, 2019). His latest documentary, Lynch: A History, explores the silence-as-protest of NFL star Marshawn Lynch. I talked with Shields via email about the film and some of his other projects-in-progress.

Interview with Jessica Laser

Peter Myers

Jessica Laser was raised in Chicago. She is the author of Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Letter Machine Editions, 2019) and the chapbooks Assumed Knowledge and the Knowledge Assumed from Experience (Catenary Press, 2015), and He That Feareth Every Grass Must Not Piss in a Meadow (paradigm press, 2016). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught writing at Brown University, the University of Iowa, Parsons School of Design, and elsewhere. She is currently a PhD student in English at UC Berkeley.

Interview with David Mura

Jing Jian

David Mura is a memoirist, novelist, poet, and literary critic. He has written the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire and two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. I talked with David Mura over email about his newest book, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2018).

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