Guest-Editing, Interviews, etc.

And now, some news before I go on summer hiatus!

It was a pleasure to guest-edit the spring issue of the literary magazine Ploughshares, with poems by Mosab Abu Toha, Khaled Mattawa, January Gill O’Neil, Rob Shapiro, Connor Watkins-Xu; excerpts from forthcoming novels by Jane Smiley and Nina McConigley; short fiction from Emily Doyle, Francisco Goldman, Jamila Minnicks, and Tommy Orange; and essays by Hannah Roberts, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Farah Abdessamad, among many others. You can buy a copy of the magazine from the Ploughshares website, or find it in your local library or independent bookstore.

Late last spring, I sat down with Dylan Cuellar and Kassia Osset, hosts of the Unburied Books podcast, to discuss Tayeb Salih’s classic novel Season of Migration to the North, translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies. It’s one of those books that gets pressed into new hands by devoted fans like me, and I never tire of talking about it. (Or writing about it! I wrote the introduction for the NYRB Classics edition of the book.) If you like stories of departures and returns, strong narrators, and doomed love affairs, you will love this one.

I also had the great honor to serve on the jury for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize, along with Jen Sookfong Lee, Claire Messud, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and Eden Robinson. This (newish) prize aims to radically transform the economic circumstances of women and nonbinary writers by awarding a significant amount of money to the winner ($150,000) and a fairly substantial amount to the finalists as well. The jury spent about twelve months reading and discussing hundreds of entries before deciding on the finalists: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Daughter by Claudia Dey, Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman-Foote, Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan, and A History of Burning by Janika Oza. The winner, announced at a ceremony in Toronto in May was Brotherless Night by V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan, a searing novel set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s civil war.