You can’t accuse Joe Donnelly of taking it easy. In a decades-spanning career, the Los Angeles writer has profiled the “who’s who” of Hollywood—from America’s sweetheart Drew Barrymore to iconoclast filmmaker Werner Herzog—in the pages of publications like L.A. Weekly, where he served as deputy editor for a number of years. During that time, his short stories have earned him an O. Henry Prize (“Bonus Baby,” from ZYZZYVA No. 103) and have been adapted into short films. Donnelly also co-founded and co-edited Slake, a short-lived but highly acclaimed journal that gathered journalism, fiction, poetry, and art, all with a distinctly […]
Tag: interview
National Poetry Month: A Q&A with ‘I Know Your Kind’ author William Brewer
by Meryl Natchez
It’s rare that any book of poems, not to mention a first book, is as powerful as I Know Your Kind (96 pages; Milkweed) by William Brewer. This book, rooted in the physical and spiritual landscape of West Virginia, tackles the opioid epidemic in verse. Focusing on the small town of Oceana (nicknamed Oxyana for the record number of overdoses there), Oceana acts as a stand-in for West Virginia as a whole, which has the highest OD rate in the country. The book is at once dreamlike and visceral, and the images in it draw on the beauty and pain […]
When Art Must Step In: Q&A with ‘Bullets into Bells’ Editor Dean Rader
by Isabel Erickson White
The poetry collection Bullets into Bells (Beacon Press) stands as an innovative response to American gun violence. The work is a collection of poetry, each poem paired with a prose response written by an “activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual.” Many of the poems are in response to widely reported shootings, such as Sandy Hook or the murder of Tamir Rice, but there are also several accounts of less publicized shootings. Despite the high coverage of gun violence in the media, reading this book gives the sense that this type of violence is even more pervasive than it seems, and that nearly […]
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Matthew Zapruder
by editor
Poet, translator, professor, and editor Matthew Zapruder was born in Washington, DC. in 1967. He earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he studied with Dara Wier, James Tate, and Agha Shahid Ali. Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bear (Copper Canyon, 2014) and Why Poetry, a book of prose about poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2017). An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also editor […]
My American Self: Q&A with ‘Human Interest’ author Valerie Bandura
by Zack Ravas
“When the Kardashians talk/at once at each other/I hear an aria/to the first-person pronoun, an icon/as sleek as the four-inch stilettos,” Valerie Bandura writes early in her latest poetry collection, Human Interest (Black Lawrence Press; 75 pages). As a poet, her lens is trained on the America where millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and dream of game-show winnings even as television and our social media peddle visions of unobtainable celebrity. Bandura’s poems are not removed from the daily experience of most people, rather they are our experience, whether we’re wondering in traffic about the life of the driver who proudly displays his “Take the Migrant out of […]
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Ellen Ullman
by editor
Ellen Ullman wrote her first computer program in 1978. She went on to have a twenty-year career as a programmer and software engineer. Her essays and books have become landmark works describing the social, emotional, and personal effects of technology. She is the author of two novels: By Blood (published by Picador), a New York Times Notable Book; and The Bug (Picador), a runner-up for the Pen/Hemingway Award. Her memoir, Close to the Machine (Picador), about her life as a software engineer during the internet’s first rise, became a cult classic. Her new book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology (MCD), tells a continuing story of […]
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Min Jin Lee
by me
Min Jin Lee is the author of two novels. Her first one, Free Food for Millionaires, was named a “Top Ten Novel of the Year” by The Times of London, NPR’ “Fresh Air,” and USA Today. Her newest novel, Pachinko, is a national bestseller and has been named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Read, and has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal. Earlier this year, she spoke about Pachinko—an epic story of the experience of generations of Koreans and Japanese of Korean heritage living in Japan—with ZYZZYVA Managing Editor […]
ZYZZYVA Interview Series: Mauro Javier Cardenas
by me
Mauro Javier Cardenas (whose story “Dora and Her Dog” was published in Issue No. 104) is the author of the new novel The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press). Harper’s Magazine has described his first novel as “a high-octane, high-modernist” work “from the gifted, fleet Mauro Javier Cardenas.” And in its starred review, Publishers Weekly said “Cardenas dizzyingly leaps from character to character, from street protests to swanky soirees, and from lengthy uninterrupted interior monologues to rapid-fire dialogues and freewheeling satirical radio programs, resulting in extended passages of brilliance.” Cardenas spoke to ZYZZYVA Managing Editor Oscar Villalon about his book at […]