http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2). Her first novel, THREATS, is due Winter 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
John: Well, no matter what, the sign of an amateur is to answer your critics. Don’t ever write a letter to a bad review because then, first of all, people didn’t even know about it the first time, maybe, and then the critic gets to answer you and put you down again. I learned a long time ago, only an amateur answers his critics. Read the bad reviews once, the good one’s twice, and put them all away and never look at them again. The only time a bad review works is when you think “that could be true a little bit,” and then you learn, and then you debate it next time. I do read reviews. I don’t believe people who say they don’t.
Tantra Bensko, MFA, teaches Experimental Fiction Writing online. Naissance Press published her chapbooks Watching the Windows Sleep, and the tiny Swinging on the Edge of Day. Her book Lucid Membrane has been accepted by NP. She has over 150 creative writing pieces in magazines. She edits her own magazine, Exclusive, and runs the resource website, Experimental Writing. She is the inventor of Lucid Fiction. She lives in Berkeley.
Susan Steinberg is the author of the short story collections, Hydroplane (FC2) and The End of Free Love (FC2). Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, LIT, Columbia, and elsewhere. She has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Vermont Studio Center, The Wurlitzer Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and Yaddo and was recently Scholar-in-Residence in the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. She received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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Kate Zambreno is the author of O Fallen Angel, which won Chiasmus Press’ “Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest.” Another novel, Green Girl, will be published by Emergency Press in Fall 2011. A nonfiction book revolving around the women of modernism, Heroines, will be published by Semiotext(e)’s Active Agents series in Fall 2012. She writes the blog Frances Farmer is My Sister. She is also an editor at Nightboat Books. Currently she is curating a series called Prose Event for the Belladonna* Collaborative, which examines the intersection of fiction and the essay. The next Prose Event will be on May 17 at Dixon Place in NYC and will feature Amina Cain, Danielle Dutton, and Renee Gladman.
photo by Eirik Steinhoff
Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press); Materialisms (Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs); and None of This Is Real (forthcoming, Sidebrow Press). The Revisionist, illustrated by Derek White, has been translated into Italian and Croatian, was the subject of a 90-foot mural at Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis, and was short-listed for The Believer 2007 Book Prize. Mellis is a founding editor at The Encyclopedia Project and a recipient of The John Hawkes Memorial Fiction Prize, The Michael Harper Praxis Prize, The New Voices Sudden Fiction Prize, and an NEH Independent Research Grant. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Cabinet, Fence, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Context, Modern Painters, Post Road and elsewhere. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Mills College. She also teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at the California College of the Arts, as well as the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College.
Debra Di Blasi (www.debradiblasi.com) is founding publisher of Jaded Ibis Press and president of Jaded Ibis Productions. In addition to her publishing role, she is a multi-genre writer and artist whose books include The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions; Drought & Say What You Like; Prayers of an Accidental Nature; What the Body Requires, and Skin of the Sun (forthcoming). Awards include a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and Diagram Innovative Fiction Award. She teaches and lectures on 21st Century narrative forms.
