Interviews

Naomi Cohn’s book, titled The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight, showcases Cohn’s experience with progressive vision loss through examinations of the definitions of words, personal childhood memories, observations of art, and the history of Braille itself. These perspectives intersect in the form of an alphabetical encyclopedia, the barriers between these forms disappearing as they all prove necessary in Cohn’s journey relearning reading and writing, and emb

Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s Exploding Head is a haunting and intimate collection of prose poetry that explores the boundary between body and mind, memory and perception. Across surreal yet deeply grounded poems, Hoffman examines embodiment, vulnerability, and the uneasy experience of living within one’s own consciousness, where angels watch the wounds that still live, and the ordinary has its own spiritual and psychological weight. Through poems that move through OCD, childhood

Gabe Montesanti’s Drag Thing: A Memoir of Mania and Mirrors chronicles the author’s emergence into drag culture and her evolution into an unclassifiable, genderfluid “drag thing.” Through experimentation and performance, Montesanti confronts binary ideas about gender conformity while navigating strained relationships and personal challenges. Her search for community, stage presence, and self often butts up against–and sometimes feeds off of–a more private battle with the man

Eshani Surya’s debut novel, Ravishing , follows estranged siblings Kashmira and Nikhil as they fall into the clutches of a dystopian beauty industry after the abandonment of their abusive father. Speculative and vulnerable, the novel explores Indian American identity, queerness, the body, chronic illness, girlhood, and friendship. In this interview, Mialise Carney and Eshani Surya discuss writing invisible illness, the beauty industry, and making the familiar strange. Mialise

Liv Mammone’s new collection, Fire in the Waiting Room , faithfully documents the intersections between disability, queerness, and identity. She traces her experience through moments of childhood, dating, and daily life, approaching each subject with unmistakable candidness. She resists the societal expectation that marginalized voices edit out pieces of themselves — a resistance illustrated in choices such as writing about pleasure alongside pain. Her poems are seeped in nua

Travis Chi Wing Lau’s latest poetry collection, What’s Left is Tender , examines tenderness in all its form—a gentle touch, a state of softness after violence, a youthfulness, an exchange, a bodily ache. Across these experimental poems, Lau guides the reader through a lyric exploration of the pains and joys of caring for others and being cared for as a disabled and queer person of color, asking the question of how we can move forward to make a more sustainable, caring world.