New England Review

Behind the Byline

Susan Heeger

NER staff reader Megan Howell talks to Susan Heeger about her story “Houseboat” from NER 42.2, its place in a tradition of boating literature, and the metaphorical significance of the story’s title.

MH: “Houseboat” is ostensibly about a father taking his three children on a vacation. However, as the narrative progresses, a second, unspoken story comes through, which is that of his divorce. Readers only catch allusions to this trauma, mostly through tense fights over boating and a fish’s capacity to feel pain. We can feel the true sense of tension within the family, the divorce, without knowing any of the intimate details. 

What made you decide not to tell the story of the divorce outright? Why mimic the parents’ tendency to talk “around and past each other” when conveying their hurt?

SH: Marital strife is such familiar ground in fiction that writing about it risks evoking familiar assumptions and responses in readers. At the same time, like the rest of human experience, its particular details and circumstances vary widely, so there are infinite ways to come at it. The parents in this story are certainly headed for divorce, but the vacation is set during their separation, as part of the father’s effort to win back his wife, who, their children sense, may have already moved on. It’s a time of uncertainty and transition—for the family, of course, and for the girls, who are in the midst of adolescence—and it seemed logical to me to put them in a boat and send them off into unknown waters. I meant for the family’s trauma to haunt the story. It recedes somewhat as the immediate adventure—with all its challenges—asserts itself, but it’s never really out of the picture. What will happen to them as individuals and as a group? Who will their parents be if they’re not a unit? Who will they be to their parents in this potentially rearranged world, not to mention as maturing people with their own concerns and inner lives?

MH: Boating expeditions have a long literary history as metaphors for the dramatic emotional journeys of heros, mostly men. From The Odyssey to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to R. Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, travel by boat is arguably one of the more masculine-coded motifs. “Houseboat” makes ample use of boats and water as both intertext (e.g., the father’s love of Mark Twain, specifically his infatuation with Mississippi River and the steamboats from his childhood) and metaphor (e.g., the houseboat crashing, the death of the bluegill). Why use a historically macho literary device to tell the story of a divorced, emasculated “doll of a man”?

SH: My choice of a boating expedition relates as much to my lifelong preoccupation with water and boats as to other narratives about the sea, though of course I’ve read many. I can’t get enough of them! The sea is irresistible to the imagination. Historically, it’s been a route to discovery, both external and internal. It’s alien and forbidding—not at all our natural element—and at the same time, we came from it and carry a version of it inside ourselves. It’s also wild, ungovernable, enormous, and alive in ways that inspire us to take it on. The fishing expedition can be a rite of passage for fathers and sons, as I envisioned it here, albeit one the father in my story has put off until he thinks he needs it to save his marriage. The trip’s challenges reveal new dimensions of him to his children. On the water, he’s less competent, less dominant and self-assured than he was at home, where the dynamics of power have also begun to shift. Parents naturally shrink from godlike to mere-mortal size as their children transition toward adulthood, but divorced parents tend to get there faster.    

MH: Though “Houseboat” is in the third-person limited voice, it doesn’t immediately reveal that it inhabits Shelley’s mind. Her perceptions of others are so subtle and pointed that they feel like the objective view of an omniscient narrator. At the same time, she’s not entirely precocious for most of the story; she still finds the divorce confounding, has trouble trying to connect to others, and is unable to articulate her emotions as well as the third-person narrator. Should readers assume that she’s become as enlightened as the narrator by the end of the journey? Or is her understanding of adult issues and her own trauma still underdeveloped?

SH: I’m not sure I know how to answer this. Shelley’s voice crept into my own head early and took over the production. By the end of the story, she’s been through a lot, but she’s still only thirteen!

MH: Even after I realized that I was viewing the world through Shelley’s eyes, I still wondered who the true protagonist of the story was. At first I thought that it was all of the children, then just Shelley, then the father. Does the story belong to any one particular character/group of characters? 

SH: This is an interesting question and one I’ve often wondered about, in a more general way, since I learned what a protagonist is. Now it seems to me a much fuzzier, or maybe a more elastic, concept than it did then, and one it’s sometimes left to the reader to decide. Whose struggle, whose piece of the story stays most indelibly in your mind after you’ve read it? It can depend on who you are, what experiences you bring to the story, and therefore which character speaks to you most particularly. For me, it’s Shelley’s story. I got it from her.

MH: One of my favorite elements of the story is the title. It’s so simple, just one word, but it conveys so much. Like the story itself, houseboats are an oxymoron that signify both rest and motion; houses are static whereas boats can only function in bodies of water, liminal spaces. Similarly, the characters are moving even when they’re resting, trying to fix their fractured family in their dad’s houseboat. Even when the children return to their mom’s, their more permanent home, the houseboat’s liminality haunts them when a wildfire threatens to unmoor them yet again. Why have a titular setting that reflects the characters’ emotional tumult? Why not have them in a more stable environment that juxtaposes their feelings?

SH: Besides water and boats, another obsession of mine is houses, being housed, being homeless, what I could live in if I had to, a question children often think about and one that preoccupied me as a child, since my family moved a lot. In the story, the boat offers a temporary, provisional home at a point when the family itself is in flux. It gave me a convenient way to physically embody an emotional “journey,” for lack of a better word, and to echo certain inner states in external dramas while also exploring ideas of home. I did travel the Sacramento River on a houseboat once, and the memory of it has stayed with me—the pared-down self-sufficiency you can achieve in a wild setting with few amenities. I’ve always wanted to write about the experience, to go back and reinhabit it. A little homework led me to discover other writers with the same impulse, maybe most famously Perry Mason’s creator Erle Stanley Gardner, who owned several houseboats and during the 1960s captured his days afloat in books like Drifting Down the Delta.

MH: “Houseboat” has a structure that’s mostly linear save for the very end. We jump from the bluegill’s asphyxiation to the drive home, leaving behind a lacuna whose missing piece hides in an inaccessible part of Shelley’s memory until she returns to her mom. What is the emotional significance of this misordering? Is her brain struggling to process some repressed, unspoken trauma that we don’t know about?

SH: When constructing a narrative, I think there are some decisions you make by instinct. There’s a point at which something feels as if it’s over. You won’t gain anything more by extending a scene or section, and you might lose your reader if you continue to stir the brew. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t more to say; it just needs to be presented differently, the details saved for later, when they might resonate more. Experience takes time to process, both in life and on the page.

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review and The Establishment  among other publications.

Behind the Byline

Rob Ehle

NER staff reader Evgeniya Dame talks to Rob Ehle, author of “A Bus as Big as a Bus,” about children as protagonists, striking the balance between funny and sad, and the importance of sharply focused curiosity.

Evgeniya Dame: There are two wonderful things going on in your story—it takes us into the mind of an eleven-year-old boy and in a smart, understated way it engages with one of the greatest, most enigmatic works of existentialism, The Stranger by Albert Camus. What came to you first? Was it the desire to write a story in Joe’s point of view or to create a commentary on Camus’s novel?

Rob Ehle: I wrote this story a long time ago. It was actually a sort of assignment for a reading at Litquake, the San Francisco fall literary festival, and the theme was “Failure to Commit.” I don’t remember how I got to be part of a group of writers much more accomplished than I. I just remember that a failure to commit felt like one of the central themes of my own life. As the deadline loomed, I realized that not getting assignments done on time was as good an example of that as any. Once that thought came to me, the first page wrote itself—just as the first page of a school assignment could, once I finally got the idea. And just as in school, I hadn’t completed the full story by the night of the reading. Anyway, each of us only had five minutes that night to read, so I didn’t really need to have it finished.

The Stranger came to me because I had recently reread it, and remembering my consternation the first time I’d done so, I started thinking about what it would be like if a very young person read it. The difference would be that the kid would feel no need in an essay or book report to disguise his complete bafflement and boredom. I don’t think there’s much of a parallel between Joe’s story and Meursault’s in The Stranger. Unless, I suppose, it’s that there’s a point somewhere around fourth or fifth grade where the universe appears disturbingly indifferent to a certain kind of kid.

ED: Do you often read fiction written from a young person’s point of view? What kind of things ring true to you (or not)?

RE: I don’t know if I read it more often than anyone else. Classics like Huckleberry Finn, or some of the Faulkner stories—“The Bear” comes to mind, The Reivers; in contemporary fiction, there’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, and certainly Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. What all this writing has in common, of course, is young people’s experience being treated with as much curiosity and seriousness as adults’. Their problems and challenges are often—at least for middle-class white kids—simple; but for the child, the problem is always new, and therefore always huge. In the case of Jesmyn Ward’s characters, the problems really are huge—for anyone, no matter what age—and that’s another layer, but the point is that a child’s perspective can often distill the confusion and despair and delight common to any life. There’s a difference between distilling experience, though, and just using an innocent’s perspective for easy emotion. Whether it’s one or the other in any particular story is what people will argue over.

ED: While Joe’s struggle with his reading is the center of the story, I loved the quiet background drama—the tension in his parents’ marriage, glimpses into Nathan’s home life, and the growing chasm between the two boys. How do you approach secondary characters in your work?

RE: I think it’s obvious that one first of all—in psychological realism, anyway—gives secondary characters as much effort in the telling as one does a primary character. I mean, that person isn’t going to get as many brushstrokes, but the ones s/he gets are going to have to be deft. I don’t know if in your own writing you’ve ever had the experience where there’s a character you’d thought of as secondary in the beginning eventually becoming a primary character in their own right, but it can happen now and then. And if sometimes it just means the story’s become ungainly, other times the current has actually found a different course. That opening up of possibility, unpredictability, which is the strength of a good story, comes partly from rendering each character with sharply focused curiosity.

ED: Could we talk about the tone of this story? It’s incredibly funny, but there is a darker tone underneath, especially once Joe begins to realize that the rules of his life have changed and things may not turn out for the best, either at school or at home. Then there is the emotional moment at the end between Joe and his mother. Do you find yourself drawn to his balance of the comic and the tragic, and how do you know when the combination is just right?

RE: Comedy gives a breeze to a story and moves it along. For better or worse, when people’s attention these days starts to flag at the 241st letter, elements like humor take importance in just keeping readers’ eyes on the page. Some people bemoan this, and for the most part I’m with them. I don’t usually write stories with quite this many laughs per line. I expect some of the tone is due to the fact that, initially, I knew I was going to be reading aloud to a crowd of folks in a bar.

On the other hand, there’s an interesting balancing act in writing about kids: they’re naturals for comedy, but they can also seduce a writer into sentimentality. And of course, as I said, their experience can sometimes distill the human condition: their challenges are magnified because it’s the first time they’re being experienced. I remember breaking something once at a summer day camp, and trying to figure out how I was going to live on nuts and berries after I ran away to live in the woods for the rest of my life. A fugitive from justice. I think I was eight. That’s a funny story, but not at all funny in the moment. There are so many times before you’re even ten years old that you are terrified or desolate. Even the most carefree child. For myself, I’m not usually thinking about balancing the comic and the serious. I’m thinking about what life is like. And if you render that truthfully, the comic and the serious and occasionally the tragic are all there.

ED: Present throughout the story is a subtle dissatisfaction—cynicism, perhaps—with the way schools promote reading habits. Were you yourself a “mathy skateboard carnivorous plant person” like Joe once? How do you think engaging with literature really happens for children?

RE: That description of Joe’s book report assignment on the first page is almost verbatim an assignment my son had when he was Joe’s age. It was given by a teacher who wouldn’t have been able to write her own way out of a paper bag. Frankly, she was probably a mathy person, but she had to cover the full curriculum, so. My son’s best reading teacher was the one who had everyone start the day reading anything they liked—story books, comics, skate magazines, whatever. She told parents how much her own father had hated reading as a child—or said he did, even though he gobbled up comic books. One would hope a child might grow up to read more than comics, but if you can’t get them to look forward to reading in the first place, they’re not going to read anything. I hope I’m not cynical about reading education, but it’s true it can be done well or poorly. I wasn’t particularly mathy, but unlike many adult writers, I wasn’t an especially voracious reader, either. My sister was “The Reader.” I was hanging with friends, riding my bike, watching television, drawing . . . and reading when there was something worth my time. Which for some reason was less often for me than for my sister.

ED: As an art director for Stanford University Press, you design book covers, and you are also a photographer. How does this interest for the visual coexist with the writer in you?

RE: My sister was The Reader (and writer), and I was The Artist. I’d draw dinosaurs, horses, planes, would copy cartoon characters, etc. My enthusiasms evolved, though, and I was an English major in college. Many years later, I sort of slipped into book design through the back door—as many people do, actually. It’s too long a story. I will say that in scholarly publishing, I find design more fun than editing, which I have never done, and which has never tempted me (all due respect to scholarship). I’ve done surprisingly little interior book design over the many years I’ve been working at the Press. The most significant has been the Pritzker Edition of The Zohar, the body of medieval Jewish mystical scripture upon which Kabbalah is based. I put the page numbers in the middle of the outside margins, that was the extent of my creative contribution pretty much. I’d like this feature someday to be referred to as “the Ehle folio.” Except I don’t think I was the first to think it up. I’ve done hundreds of cover designs, maybe thousands by this point. It’s not quite as glamorous as it sounds when you’re doing them for books about the Brazilian hemp trade from 1847 to 1863, and you know they’re going to sell only a few hundred copies, but as I say, it’s still fun. And the best thing is that my head isn’t filled with anyone else’s prose when I sit down to write.

ED: What are some of the projects you are working on right now?

RE: Other stories, certainly, and I’m writing a historical California novel that begins with two boys and a mastodon.

ED: Thank you very much!

Evgeniya Dame, a fiction reader for NER, is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020–2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her fiction appears in Ploughshares, Subtropics, Southern Review, and Joyland. Her nonfiction and interviews have been published in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She grew up in Samara, Russia, and currently lives in Northern California. 

Behind the Byline

Thomas Dai

NER staff reader Sarah Wolfson talks to Thomas Dai about his essay “Driving Days” and all the “different people, books, images, etc. getting in and out of the car at different points of the essay.”

SW: “Driving Days” centers on a road trip you took to follow Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly-collecting routes across America. Yet the essay is so much more than a literary travelogue. In it, you explore the self and contemporary America by considering migration, queerness, belonging, Asian-American identities, and the idea of lens more generally: who is looking at whom and how. It’s an ambitious and multifaceted piece. When you began your road trip, did you have a sense of just how much this essay would encompass?

TD: When I began the trip, I wanted to keep the essay rather minimal and focused: I was going to write about Nabokov, all these American places he’d gone to hunt butterflies, and I was going to do it while also driving around to those places. That was five years ago, and each time I’ve pulled the essay back out to revise, that same basic story—Nabokov, me, the butterflies, driving—would feel a bit foggier, and the other stuff started seeping in, as if to replace what my memories and notes alone couldn’t supply. I wound up with this mishmash of stuff, some of which feels organically related to what I was doing that summer, some of which feels a bit more forced, but I guess I liked the idea of all these different people, books, images, etc. getting in and out of the car at different points of the essay. I actively dislike driving, which doesn’t translate well to writing about a road trip, and so getting to bring along all this “baggage” made a really boring and at times harrowing activity much more interesting for me.

SW: What surprised you most about the writing of this essay? 

TD: Honestly, that I spent as little time as I did writing about cars, car culture, or the literal road. Luckily, Nabokov always seemed more concerned with the roadside than the road—he never drove but was a frequent passenger—so I let that be my license to take the same stance, even if, in my case, the physical act of driving was obviously still very much part of the experience. 

SW: This piece looks like a travelogue but moves like an essay. In the span of one paragraph you hop from Tori Amos to white aspen trees to Lolita. Later you move poignantly from Nabokov’s “Continental” method of killing butterflies for collection to a memorial for Matthew Shepard. Themes emerge and are refined as new vignettes appear. How did you think about structure when writing this piece? Was it something that you mapped or that emerged organically?

TD: With this essay, I actually tried my best not to fight the simple, linear structure that defines pretty much every road trip I’ve ever been on. You start somewhere. You end up somewhere else. What you see and consider along the way is the essay. Because all the road names I take as section headings refer to actual roads which I drove on in exactly that order, this essay definitely has a map underlying it, and I depended on that map to keep me situated while I made all these essayistic tangents on Nabokov, Tseng Kwong-Chi, Grindr escapades, lepidoptery, and everything else.

SW: You write with nuance about Nabokov’s antihero Humbert Humbert. You manage to find in him “clues about how most of us, good or evil, seem to live our lives.” How difficult was it to incorporate a character like Humbert into the piece?

TD: Humbert’s one of those characters (and Nabokov one of those writers) who’s obviously garnered a lot of attention from scholars and other writers. That can be intimidating, especially if you feel like you need to say something “new” or specific to your moment. This essay definitely doesn’t have anything new to say about Humbert or the literary ethics of Lolita, which doesn’t mean I’m not interested in that whole discourse (recent, great essays on Lolita by Ian Frazier and Susan Choi come to mind), but there’s also no getting around the fact that my own Nabokovian journeying really began with another text, Speak, Memory, and another character: Nabokov-as-child, swinging his butterfly net. I think this essay reflects that bias.

SW: You say you don’t want to “pin [yourself], insect-like to the coattails of just one story.” To me, that reflects a central purpose of essays: a rejection of easy certainty in favor of complicating, opening, connecting. What attracts you most to the essay form?

TD: Pretty much what you just said: the desire to complicate narratives, especially the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves, but also that instinct’s opposite, which I think of as a move towards clarity that never quite clarifies. Essays search for the heart of things but tie themselves in knots to get there—if they get there, and usually they don’t.

SW: You’re currently working on a PhD in American Studies. This essay takes a creative lens to the study of America. How does your academic work inform your creative essays or vice versa?

TD: Oh boy, that’s definitely a question I’m still figuring out for myself. All I can say for now is that there’s first and foremost a practical connection between my academic work and my writing. Academia provides me the time and resources I need to write, even as it also exerts demands that take that time away, or rather redirects that time elsewhere. More specifically, I couldn’t have taken off on this trip if I hadn’t gotten a small grant from a center at the University of Arizona where I did my MFA. I also would’ve dragged my feet on writing the essay longer than I did if I hadn’t taken a course on space and literature at Brown, where I’m doing my doctorate, that had rather lax rules about what made an “academic” term paper. I’m sure there’s also a more conceptual connection between my training in American Studies and how I write about America, but that connection can be hard for me to describe, even to myself, without caricaturing what “academia” and “creativity” are and can be.

SW: “Driving Days” is part of a larger set of essays that you describe as “mapping the self.” Could you tell me more about that project? 

TD: The collection I’m working on straddles two interrelated genres: travel-writing and place-writing. Both are genres that can be rather sentimental, which I admittedly enjoy (every first draft I write verges on the florid), but which I also have learned to be wary of, because there’s so much at stake when we represent or claim an affinity for a place. Boiled down to their cores, the essays in this project are all about the relations we forge with different places, whether fleeting or long-term, and how those relations are in a constant state of flux. The essays are maps in a way, but mutable ones, at once fallible and incomplete.

SW: You’re about to set off on more travels. Where are you headed and what do you hope to find?

TD: Speaking of sentimental journeys, I’m traveling to East Tennessee, to what I guess would be my version of Nabokov’s Vyra. I haven’t lived in the South in quite some time, and so there’s definitely some writerly motive hanging about in my peripherals, but it’s early stages yet, and I’m mostly just glad to be headed home. 

SW: Thanks so much for speaking with me about this wonderful essay.

Sarah Wolfson, a staff reader for NER, is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, AGNI, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University. 

Behind the Byline

Charif Shanahan

Charif Shanahan, photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Sabrina Islam talks to Charif Shanahan about opening up conversations around trauma, poetry as a kind of spirituality, and his poem “Worthiness,” published in NER 42.1.

Sabrina Islam: In your incredible poem “Your foot, your root,” you write, “My mother says I am not African American, I am an Arab. / My friend Solmaz writes It matters what you call a thing.” Elsewhere, you talk about the psychic trauma of multiple colonializations and the complexity around identity in North Africa. Do you find that poetry provides any kind of framework that might help you reclaim your heritage and identity?

Charif Shanahan: My heritage and my identities are my own, whether I write poems about them or not. I think of my work less as a reclamation of my heritage and identity, and more as an articulation of the complexities around my cultural inheritance and subject position/s. The act of speaking within a given social context seems to require that one occupy a position within that social world—and so how does that problematize speaking, in poems or otherwise, for someone who challenges the integrity of those positions simply by existing? I try to take up this question in a poem recently published by the Yale Review.

SI: In “Worthiness,” you write, “On a cellular level trauma is inscribed into the body of the person who survives it, scientists confirm. / Some say the word “trauma” is overused these days to the extent its meaning is diminished. / The intention of the chokehold is to induce an unconscious state.” In your writing practice, how do you grapple with the heaviness of trauma? How do you show yourself generosity?

CS: I show myself generosity precisely by grappling with forces that would otherwise render me silent. It can be an act of generosity (to one’s self and to others) to speak at all.

SI: Then there is also the task of bringing this heaviness to your readers, students, and family: “You’ll have to forgive me for being heavy. / Speaking to you here, like this, is the most difficult thing I can do. / The presence it requires is agonizing, feels fatal.” How do you make room for these discussions in poetry and in the classroom?

CS: I make room for these discussions in my poetry by centering them at times, by being willing to have them at all. What’s the point of making art that risks nothing? That is silent about the aspects of human life most in need of our reckoning? As an educator, I try to make room not just for the “difficult,” but for everything—poems that exist across the full spectrum of human emotion and experience—because that is the truth of what we live. Without a sense of safety, I don’t think it’s possible to discuss meaningfully a poem whose stakes feel very high, and so it’s a priority for me to ensure that each student feels safe, seen and heard.

SI: In a review of your poetry collection in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Margaret Stawowy recognizes an uncompromising sense of the dignity of others in your poetry. In your poem “Single File,” you write, “I don’t mean who we are to each other; I mean / who we are to ourselves.” How do you think about identity and worthiness?

CS: Well, it’s clear that some identities have been rendered less worthy by the terms of the world. That’s a lie, of course. The first and only conferrer of worthiness is yourself.

SI: What does belonging to a physical place mean to you?

CS: I don’t know. I tend to think of “belonging” metaphysically, spiritually. And I don’t know that we can separate physical spaces from their ghosts. If I belong—am at home—anywhere, it’s in my body. But that body, naturally, carries histories, both personal and collective, and has different meanings based on where I bring it, some of which challenge my inhabitation of it.

SI: The line from your earlier collection, “I want to enter my life like a room,” is echoed in “Worthiness.” You once said that the poem is something we can experience in our body and that, although one’s analytical intelligence is often emphasized, our body can also be a guide to understanding and appreciating the poem without the need to articulate what that is. In your experience, does the ritual of encountering and repeating familiar lines of poetry help develop such emotional intelligence?

CS: Yes. The more we encounter an individual poem, the more sophisticated a reader of that poem we become, naturally, though what that means, for me, often has little to do with “the mind.” There is great pleasure for me in close reading and analysis, in breaking the poem down to its constituent parts to see how they come together to make meaning. At once, I think of poetry as a kind of prayer, and the space that poetry occupies in my life is akin to a kind of spirituality. In this way, I try to practice a fullness of reading, rather than a compartmentalization of it; to read—and experience—the poem not just with my mind, but with my entire being.

SI: Are you working on a new writing project?

CS: Yes, I recently completed my second poetry collection. I’ve also been working on a third—a book-length epistolary poem to Whiteness—as well as a collection of essays about mixed-race identity in the US; Blackness in the Maghreb; and the transnational dimensions of racial experience.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Charif.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright grant to Morocco, among other awards and recognitions. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University, where he teaches poetry in the undergraduate and Litowitz MFA+MA programs.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an MFA in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

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