Claire Lawrence: I was the middle aged woman in the third row from the back, worried that her hair and glasses weren’t cool enough for the writer crowd anymore, worried that she’d never have a book like all the people she went to school with (two top-ranked writing programs), worried about the rapid passage of time marked so clearly in everyone’s faces each time she goes to AWP.  I teach a four/ four load at a public university that wants me to care about assessing my students, not so much about teaching them anything. I have a ten-year-old, a five-year-old, [Read more...]

Mary Harpin: How did you get your start as a published writer?       Edwidge Danticat: I started out submitting to small literary magazines, the kind that pay you with two copies of the issue. I have a great deal of respect for people who do this work because you would get back these stunningly beautiful little gems and someone, or a few people, had put so much work into making your story look good, and into the publication in general. After I’d been published in a few places, I applied to the MFA program at Brown University and [Read more...]

Amy King:  Thanks so much for being in touch with us here at VIDA.  It’s heartening to hear that the 2010 VIDA Count served as an impetus for change at Tin House.  Can you describe your initial reaction when you first saw the numbers?   . Rob Spillman:  I was surprised by the disparity. Before the numbers came out, we had consciously sought balance, but not in a systematic way. Not to make excuses, but 2010 was our most out of balance year. If this had been 2007, when we did a whole issue called “Fantastic Women”, featuring women who [Read more...]

Carol Moldaw and Abigail DeWitt went to the same boarding school in Northern California a few years apart and then met at Harvard after a high school teacher suggested they look each other up. After college, their lives continued to overlap when both lived in Berkeley for a time before both moving back to the Boston/Cambridge area. DeWitt has lived in western North Carolina since 1994 and is the author of two novels, Dogs and Lili. Moldaw has lived outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, since 1990 and has written five books of poetry, including The Lightning Field and So [Read more...]

Julianna Baggott is the bestselling and acclaimed author of 18 books. A novelist in several genres, a poet and essayist, Baggott powerfully addresses questions in her work about gender, love, politics, and truth. Her most recent novel, Pure, the first in the Pure trilogy, published by Grand Central Publishing and recently named one of the NYT’s Best Books of 2012, depicts a haunting, terrifying, and thrilling dystopia in which catastrophic Detonations have destroyed the world, and only a select few, the Pures, have been protected in a Dome. The survivors outside have been damaged and altered, fused by the bombs [Read more...]

Jane Hirshfield speaks with poet Leslie McGrath about what it means to be women-poets of their generation. The two met in 2004 at the Bennington Writing Seminars, when Hirshfield was McGrath’s teacher.

A feminine academe could bring the poetry calling and practice back to the source, and explore the feminine history of this literary outrider world. And it’s happening already.

In the previous fifteen years, The Academy of American Poet’s prizes went to forty-one men and thirty-nine women. These numbers may seem reassuring, but keep in mind that they are not representative of an overall balance in individual prizes.

“I talk to a lot of attendees––strangers, colleagues, and friends––about which events standout and which events they think didn’t work particularly well. Ultimately, the AWP conference has very little to do with what I think anyway; what matters is what the AWP members and the conference attendees think. Though I don’t get to see much of the conference, I feel very lucky to be able to honestly say I love my job.”

“I actually think there could be another kind of anthem, a more complicated and nebulous anthem that nonetheless loses none of its riot or exuberance, and I love the idea of a gynocentric anthem: I’ve been really interesting in reading and writing such poems.”