“There’s a moment that may surprise you reading Percival Everett’s novel James, a reimagining of Huck Finn’s Black sidekick and their treacherous journey to freedom. It’s the moment when you take a break from laughing hysterically to realize you’re laughing at a book about slavery. Many writers are afraid to insert levity in stories of tragedy, particularly stories of violent prejudice. But James, which won the National Book Award, shows that to omit joy is to do a disservice to the people who endured those tragedies—people who, despite their circumstances, always found ways to fall in love, have children, create art, and, indeed, laugh.
There’s a lesson in there about how to write, but there’s also one about how to live. Percival is a writer, painter, musician, equestrian, fly fisherman, mathematician, father, husband, and professor. It would all be annoying if I didn’t learn so much from him—chiefly that life is long, arduous, and unfair, but it’s always worth living.”
Red Hen Press authors Clarence Major and April Ossmann were featured on the April 2, 2025 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour. Both authors discussed their latest Red Hen releases—Four Days in Algeria and We—and shared selected poems from their collections during the broadcast.
After “Killers of the Flower Moon”
By Elise Paschen
Lily Gladstone confides she wore my great
grandmother Eliza’s blankets in three scenes.
I don’t remember my great grandmother, though
in a photo, aged ninety, she holds me in her arms.
The actress plays Mollie Burkhart, who lived
down the street from Eliza in Fairfax.
Hands out wide, Lily says Eliza had a broad wingspan.
She pleated the wool broadcloth several times.
In 1988, photojournalist and photo editor Aline Manoukian captured an image of a Palestinian militiaman holding a white kitten in Lebanon’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. That photo would go on to circulate for decades, recently appearing across social media platforms in doctored forms, including as a colorized poster.
When I went on a research trip to Lebanon in 2017 for my new novel, The Burning Heart of the World, I met Manoukian for the first time. We both come from Armenian families, and mutual Armenian friends put us in touch; that’s the way things often work in our community of diasporic artists, writers, and academics.
Nancy Kricorian, who was born and raised in the Armenian community of Watertown, Massachusetts, is the author of four novels about post- genocide Armenian diaspora experience, including Zabelle, which was translated into seven languages, was adapted as a play, and has been continuously in print since 1998. Her essays and poems have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Guernica, Parnassus, Minnesota Review, The Mississippi Review, and other journals.
On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas about her new position and the exciting plans she has in the works during her service.
Nancy Kricorian is featured in Thrive, the project of the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA). In the piece, she reflects on her life philosophy and explores her connection to Armenian identity and culture.
Two poems by William Archila from his collection Canícula/Dog Days, “Radio” and “Guayaberas,” along with their Spanish translations by Mario Zetino, are featured in the latest issue of the Los Angeles Review.
Pasadena Now reports on author Nancy Kricorian’s recent visit to St. Gregory A. & M. Hovsepian School, where she met with 8th-grade students to discuss her new novel, The Burning Heart of the World.
“I grew up in a two-family house in the Armenian enclave of East Watertown, Massachusetts. My parents, my sister, and I lived on the ground floor, and my grandmother and uncle lived above us. My grandmother and her friends spoke Armenian, cooked Armenian food, and as a community worked to recreate an Armenian world out of the remnants of what had survived the genocide and ethnic cleansing they had endured but rarely spoke about.” – Nancy Kricorian
Lara Ehrlich’s upcoming novel, Bind Me Tighter Still—set to be released this September—is featured in Every Book a Doorway. The reviewer praises the book’s originality, writing that it contains ideas they “couldn’t have come up with in a thousand years.”
April Ossmann was recently interviewed by The Reporter, where she reflected on her literary journey and discussed how rising political tensions in the United States since 2015 have shaped the poems in her new collection, We.
In Cynthia Hogue’s tenth collection of poetry, instead, it is dark, she explores the lingering ghosts of war after her husband suffers a heart attack and recounts dreams of his childhood during World War II. Hogue begins to document her husband’s memories and nightmares about growing up in postwar France during food shortages. The project takes on another meaning when Hogue embarks on a journey to collect stories from her husband’s extended family still living in France. Through research, interviews, and conversations, Hogue creates a powerfully moving collection that interrogates how war can affect one family and how history overlaps, often messily and painfully, with the present. On the collection, the poet Ilya Kaminsky writes, “How do other people’s memories come to live in our bodies, how do they travel by means of language, from one human body to another, across time and miles, painful miles? I ask this question out of sorrow, yes, but also in wonder, upon reading Cynthia Hogue’s beautiful, transformative instead, it is dark, a book not of tales or dreams or historical accounts but of memories that survive us, that have already survived us, as they’ve entered the lyric.” It was an honor to review Hogue’s book and also speak with her about documentary poetics, poetic witness, poetry and “responsibility,” and much more.
Vanishing: A Love Story — a documentary by Sandra Luckow receiving a preview screening at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. on April 8 at 7 p.m., with a Q&A with the director to follow — tells the story of novelist Cai Emmons: her energetic life; her vibrant family and loving partner, playwright Paul Caladrino; and, keeping it all in sharp focus, her death. “Remember me with joy,” Emmons says. “This isn’t going to be a grim film, I promise.”
Vanishing: A Love Story screens at Linsly-Chittenden Hall, (LC) 101, 63 High St., on April 8 at 7 p.m. A Q&A with the director follows. The screening is open to the public and admission is free.
Malia Márquez’s City of Smoke and Sea is featured in Alta Journal’s “13 New Books for April” — a list of titles their editors are excited about.
