Members and friends, we hope you’re getting through the dog days of summer, hopefully with some great books to keep you company! This past week, our members have been busy with reviews of books by authors including Kristopher Jansma, Wendell Berry, Elif Shafak, Fiona McFarlane, SIlvia Moreno-Garcia, Gayl Jones, and more, and interviews with writers like Carl Phillips and Terese Svoboda. Stay safe, stay cool, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
NBCC lifetime member Fran Hawthorne reviewed Our Narrow Hiding Places by Kristopher Jansma for the New York Journal of Books.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Stephen B. Snyder’s translation of Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Barbara J. King reviewed Wendell Berry’s Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023 for NPR.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers in the Sky for Arts Alive San Antonio.
NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn reviewed Highway Thirteen by Fiona McFarlane for the Los Angeles Times.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Snowden Wright’s The Queen City Detective Agency and Ellery Lloyd’s The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby for BookTrib.
NBCC board member David Woo wrote about seven new poetry collections, including ones by Carl Phillips, Nam Le, and Danez Smith, for Literary Hub.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll reviewed Michael Barakiva’s Keepers of the Stones and Stars and Shaun Hamill’s The Dissonance for Reactor, and Laurel Dodge’s The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell for the Portland Press Herald. He also wrote about July books in translation for Words Without Borders.
Diane Scharper reviewed Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt by Willard Spiegelman for America magazine.
NBCC board member Lauren LeBlanc reviewed SIlvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Seventh Veil of Salome for The New York Times Book Review and Gayl Jones’ The Unicorn Womanfor The Boston Globe.
Nell Beram reviewed two books for Shelf Awareness: Scott Phillips’ The Devil Raises His Own and Charlotte Vassell’s The In Crowd.
Aiden Hunt reviewed Cameron Barnett’s Murmur for Another Chicago Magazine.
Robert Rubsam reviewed Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite for The Washington Post.
Sebastian Stockman offered his own spin on the Hillbilly Elegy takedown in “Let Us Now Graze Famous Men,” for A Saturday Letter.
Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Elwin Cotman’s Weird Black Girls for Locus.
For The Red Hook Star-Revue, Michael Quinn reviewed Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Something.
Member Interviews
DW McKinney interviewed Drs. Rondrea Mathis, Clarissa West-White, and Kideste Yusef about Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels: Myths, Legends, and Other Lies You’ve Been Told about Black Women, their essay anthology in which DW also has an essay, for Mutha Magazine.
Mandana Chaffa, NBCC’s Vice President of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, interviewed Carl Phillips on the occasion of his new collection, Scattered Snows, to the North, for Chicago Review of Books.
Jake Casella Brookins talked to Taylor Driggers about C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra for the podcast A Meal of Thorns.
Eric Olson interviewed Eva Walker and Jacob Uitti about The Sound of Seattle: 101 Songs that Shaped a City for The Seattle Times.
Hollay Ghadery interviewed Brent Van Staalduinen about his novel Unthinkable and Margaret Nowaczyk about her book of essays Marrow Memory: Essays Of Discovery for the show Howl on CIUT 89.5 FM. Hollay also hosted NBCC member Terese Svoboda on The (CanL)It Crowd.
Adam M. Lowenstein interviewed Alison Mariella Désir about her book Running While Black for Reframe Your Inbox.
Member News
Chris Barsanti’s The Writer’s Year Page-A-Day Calendar 2025: 365 Days of Inspiration, Prompts, and Quotes is now on sale from Workman.
An excerpt from Elizabeth Rosner’s Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listeningappeared in The Adroit Journal.
Kristin Dykstra’s Vermont-based collection of prose poetry, Dissonance, is the recipient of the third annual Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize from the University of Chicago Press. Dissonance is forthcoming in early 2025 in the Phoenix Poets series. Kristin is also the judge for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation.
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