Interviews

Interview with Anthony Madrid

Devin King

Anthony Madrid is the author of two books of poetry: I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium, 2012) and Try Never (Canarium, 2017). Both books are built around the investigation of specific forms—I Am Your Slave explores the possibilities of the ghazal, a medieval Arabic form, and Try Never uses the linked engylnion, a form of early Welsh nature poetry. Madrid also enjoys the pleasures of rhyme, though he is never lazy or cheap in the utilization of this texture. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. He is also insistent as a critic of poetry—most notably at The Paris Review blog.

Interview with Amanda Nadelberg

Ellen Boyette

Amanda Nadelberg is the author of three books of poetry: Isa the Truck Named Isadore, selected by Lisa Jarnot as winner of the 2005 Slope Editions Book Prize; Bright Brave Phenomena (Coffee House Press, 2012); and Songs from a Mountain (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, and Chicago Review, among other places, and in 2016 she was a columnist in residence for SFMOMA’s Open Space. She is a graduate of Carleton College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held Truman Capote and Teaching-Writing Fellowships, and where she returned in the summer of 2017 to teach a graduate poetry workshop. A recipient of a grant from The Fund for Poetry and an advisor to The Song Cave, she is originally from Boston and lives in Oakland.

Interview with Carmen Maria Machado

Katlyn Williams

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the acclaimed debut collection Her Body and Other Parties, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her stories have appeared in wide-ranging publications, including The New Yorker, Guernica, Granta, Best American Science Fiction and Horror, and VICE. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, Machado makes real a boundary-breaking assortment of extreme or extra-realist situations, like disappearing women stitched into formal gowns or dead girls and doppelgangers haunting Law & Order: SVU’s Detectives Benson and Stabler. Within these fantastical landscapes, Machado grounds her narrators, and thus her readers, in visceral emotion and human contact.

Interview with Veteran Writers

TIR Staff

Interview with Cole Becher, author of "Charybdis" (43/1)

Interview with Katherine Schifani, author of "Pistol Whip"

Katherine Schifani

In March 2015, TIR intern Erin Marshall interviewed Kate Schifani, whose essay "Pistol Whip" won our 2014 Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans.

EM: Could you discuss why you decided to write about your military experiences?

The Creative Process Interview with Hilary Mantel

By Mia Funk

Hilary Mantel is the two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize for her best-selling novels, Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies—an unprecedented achievement. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently adapted Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies for the stage to colossal critical acclaim and a BBC/Masterpiece six-part adaption of the novels.

The author of fourteen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, and the memoir Giving up the Ghost, she is currently at work on the third instalment of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy.

Mantel delivered this year’s Reith Lectures which will be broadcast this month on the BBC.