Tell us about your fiction piece “Reading Aloud” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? Just as the character in the story does, I read to my mother when she was in a nursing home for the better part of the last year of her life. She had read to me when I was a child,...

Tell us about your poem “The Weekend” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? It came, firstly, as a response to SZA’s song “The Weekend,” leaking like syrup into my ear, on repeat, for what felt like a full year. I wrote the poem last fall and still the song is playing...

It’s that time of year again when we all start to prep and plan out the most important thing about AWP—our conference clothes! I’m kidding of course, but it’s no secret that the stakes can feel high about what to wear at the biggest literary...

Tell us about your CNF piece “The Coward” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? This piece actually began 10 years ago, during the Hamline summer writing workshop. The visiting professor asked us to write about an article of clothing that was special to us, and the...

Tell us about your poem “Some Exorcisms That Lead Away from Forgetting” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I have two memories of this poem in its early stages. One being that I was able to take a graduate-level poetry workshop last year, and after going over this...

Tell us about your fiction piece “Bliss” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I have friends who own a boat. It is docked near the Raspberry Island Bandshell, a spot where many outdoor weddings occur. One day my friends told me they’d been sitting on their boat,...

Tell us about your poem “My Black Boy Dead” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? “My Black Boy Dead” emerged from a kind of haunting. Although the poem resonates with recent anti-black violence, it came from a state of emergency in my youth. I grew up in Detroit...

Tell us about your CNF piece “Isle of Refuge” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? A few years ago, I was in Bermuda over spring break researching the life of Mary Prince, an abolitionist from the nineteenth-century. I couldn’t stop thinking about how this fantasy...

1. Tell us about your fiction piece “Jim” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I had a short story collection that was evolving for years and finally it evolved into a cesspool of a novel. I knew it was, and so I ended up revising it, but that’s one of the pieces...

Tell us about your poem “Mother” in Volume 22. How did it come to be? I came across Warsan Shire’s epigraph from her poem “The House” that I used in my poem “Mother” via an AFREADA x Africa Writes Competition in which we were asked to use her line “Mother says there...