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In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers discusses the themes of Blackness, intersectionality, and diaspora in her essay collection, Misbehaving at the Crossroads (Harper, 2025), and how it serves as a companion piece to her novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021).
The rate at which the Earth rotates has been gaining speed, and as a result, days have been slowly getting shorter over the last ten years, according to a recent New York Times article. Yet, for many millennia before, the days were gradually growing longer, with a T. rex living through days that were only about twenty-three and a half hours long. Though these incremental changes in time are too tiny in scale for us to register, time can certainly feel like it moves at different rates. Write a personal essay that recounts a situation from your past that took place either over a seemingly expanded or contracted span of time. Experiment with how you speed up or slow down your retelling, either mimicking or contradicting the essay’s pacing with how the experience felt.
“In a lot of ways, this popular culture is the water that I swim in. I can’t escape it.” In this Magers & Quinn Booksellers event, Alice Bolin reads an essay about Star Trek from her latest collection, Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse (Mariner Books, 2025), and discusses technology, cults, and feminism with author Sally Franson.
In this Books Are Magic event, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda reads from her English translation of Yoko Tawada’s essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions, 2025) and discusses Tawada’s defamiliarization of the Japanese and German languages in a conversation with fellow translator Susan Bernofsky.
In this event at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Dana A. Williams delivers a keynote address on Toni Morrison’s career and influence as an editor at Random House and joins Howard Rambsy II for a conversation about Morrison’s pivotal role in shaping and contributing to modern Black literature. An excerpt of Williams’s book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (Amistad, 2025) is featured in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In a recent New Yorker article about the past, present, and future of Brooklyn’s popular Green-Wood Cemetery, Paige Williams writes about a tour guide who “urged her audience not to leave a decision as important as eternity to others” and a cemetery employee who has already decided the guest list, what beverages to serve, and the playlist for his future funeral. Write a personal essay that meditates on your thoughts about your own post-death wishes. Whether it’s something you’ve thought about and planned meticulously already or something you mostly avoid, take the time to consider rituals, traditions, and funerals you’ve attended, as well as the array of options to choose from as technology and trends evolve. How do you envision your eternal send-off and resting place?
In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Maggie Nelson reads from her book Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave Books, 2025) and speaks about the norms around illness memoirs and her desire to confront pain head-on through writing in a conversation with Darcey Steinke. “The book ended up being about what’s beneath this kind of quest for care,” says Nelson.
“Writing lends itself to filmmaking in terms of structuring a story, but I think filmmaking lends itself to more visually stimulating writing.” —Lawrence Burney, author of No Sense in Wishing
“Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year,” writes Susan Choi in the beginning of her 2019 award-winning novel, Trust Exercise, in which two high school freshmen fall in love and experience an intense love affair until they return to their performing arts school the next fall. When other classmates and teachers get involved, the outlines of their burgeoning relationship begin to seem less clear as the realities and complexities of group social dynamics come into play. Write a personal essay that chronicles the subtle or dramatic shifts of a relationship you’ve had in which your dynamic with the other person encountered some sort of transformation when the setting or surroundings of your relationship changed. Did issues of power, control, or social expectations have an effect? What questions arise when considering performance of the self in private versus in public?
In Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang and forthcoming in August from Riverhead Books, the protagonist Yu Ling works as a nanny for a wealthy couple and their young son in China, after initially taking on duties assisting in the art studio of her employer, Qin Wen. In a flashback, Yu Ling recalls a remark by Qin Wen about an artist she admires: “Do you know why Alice Neel liked drawing mothers and children so much? It’s because she abandoned her own child.” Compose a pair of short lyrical essays, one that originates from loss and one that begins with a thing achieved or acquired. You might start with your instinctive responses to personal losses and gains, whether physical or more abstract. Do your attendant essays mirror each other or diverge?
