I knew I was going to love Eric C. Wat when I read his website bio and he described writing “for queer folks whose main concern in life isn’t coming out”—which is a nice way of describing what I would call queer people who are not flattened to that one singular drama in the weird vacuum of (white) (middle class) (pop-fic) queer lit. That is, Wat writes for and about people with immigrant families, difficult or precarious jobs, illnesses and/or addictions, and all the stuff of real life.

We emailed with our friend Hannah Grieco about her session Writing Wrestling Live, coming to the Barrelhouse conference at American University in DC on April 18, 2026.

It was just about the easiest and fastest conference proposal in the history of our long-running Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing. A Dolly Parton Poetry Workshop? At the conference hosted by the literary magazine that literally has a love of pop culture written into our DNA? Yes, please, as soon as possible! We emailed with the person who sent us that proposal and will be leading “Take Me Back: A Dolly Parton Poetry Workshop” at our upcoming conference on April 18 in DC, about the workshop what makes Dolly a particularly rich text, and what other pop icons might lend themselves to poetic pursuits.

So begins Larsen’s lyrical inquiry and examination of the private miracle, the private sacrament, and the private devotion that comes from an erasure of the self.

How does a writer, or anyone really, cope in a world filled with waiting rooms, part-time jobs at trendy health stores, and expertly coordinated medical malpractice?

It’s the type of collection that makes a reader want to wander out in the street, burbling with the fever of discovery, desperate to tell anyone what he has felt.

Matthews’s deftness of language, cleanness of form, and laser-focused intent presents the reader with a collection of prayers in the guise of poems.

In a time of ongoing grief from multiple, ongoing crises, what if we paused instead of pushing through our days?

An honest, searching look at the violence that lurks in our houses, our neighborhoods, and our language.

Can literature bear witness without aestheticizing pain? Can story save us? Make us stronger? And what even counts as story?

There is a reason Bush’s book was released on Earth Day. How we connect with the world around us teaches us how we can connect with people.

I don’t know that I was able to fully realize what this novel wanted to be until in 2019, I came up with the idea of combining the story of this isolated family with the story of someone falling into the gravity of an extremist militia group. The Proud Boys and other groups like that had been around for a while before then but were just beginning to break through into the public consciousness, and it seemed like a natural progression for the characters. When those two ideas combined, the novel came together very quickly.

These moments reflect Champagne’s larger preoccupation with the gaps between perception and reality, between what is said and what is meant.

River Selby’s Hotshot: A Life on Fire is a tremendously smart book about the interrelations of contemporary American societies and land relations, woven through their personal history of working as a woman in the highly gendered space of a wildland hotshot crew.

At the heart of True Failure are silhouettes of young adults today searching for meaning and purpose when milestones seem to elude them.

I've always been interested in nontraditional paths towards queerness and especially trans identity, as my own path was not linear in the way I thought it should be as a young person, and dramatizing an even weirder path than I've ever looked at before with Joan was one of my aims with the book.

Our new online issue is tailored for the sophisticated consumer of online smut and similar, interested in elevating their online browsing habits to the highest level.

One need not have seen the film to appreciate the absurdity of a Nobel prize winner trying “to reason with a potato intent on drinking men’s blood and taking over the world.”

Law of the Letter asserts that the liminal space our language occupies is ruled less by uncertainty than by potential, and by sheer possibility.

One might not think the Taco Bell secret menu could be made tragic; trust Kyle Seibel, it can.