Su Cho’s debut poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, examines the stories of language through relationships, food, space, and places. She shares how she resisted the urge to be concerned with accuracy when including Korean characters and words; instead, she chose to portray being stuck in language, to capture the symmetry and asymmetry of language and translation.

Lyzette Wanzer ruminates on the events leading up to the conception of her edited volume Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives. As she breaks down the four sections of the anthology, she discusses the historical and ongoing racism through the policing of natural hair, racial justice, intergenerational trauma, the creation of Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (C.R.O.W.N. Act), collaboration, and writing across genres.

Cija Jefferson reflects on her experiences in an MFA program, craft, community, and revision. Her MFA project, Sonic Memories and Other Essays, is her first book, in which nine essays capture different stages of the writer as she frames sounds and silences to capture adulthood, grief, loss, and time.

Dure Aziz Amna talks about writing her debut novel, American Fever, using tuberculosis as a motif to explore questions of who is responsible for high school exchange student Hira’s health and nourishment in the alleged land of opportunity and abundance. She shares how she was interested in interrogating how culture -- and food -- are formed and deformed when transported from Pakistan to the United States.

Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico) shares how her research on the history of social movements, subculture activist archives, Germany, and Black Studies shaped her monograph, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. As she discusses some of the topics explored in her book - collectivity, quotidian intellectuals, and Germany's erasure of its own colonial history - and how voices in the diaspora in their regional/local contexts belong in robust trans(inter)national collectivity.

Nguyễn An Lý talks about her experiences as a translator, especially in reference to Thuận’s atmospheric Chinatown. Using the novel as a focal point, she also elaborates on readership, audience expectations, the idea of cultural tourism, Chinatown as a physical and metaphorical space, and her work with Zzz Review.

Dr. Reighan Gillam (University of Southern California) discusses how her fieldwork and research on media producers in Brazil shaped her first monograph Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media. She speaks on how her work in anthropology intersects with media and race studies, antiracist visual politics, alternative media in Brazil, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and the question of ethics in research.

Belinda Huijuan Tang recollects how emotionally resonant family stories inspired her debut novel A Map for The Missing and connects the gaokao (the standardized college entrance exam) with the years 1977, 1982, and 1993 as major historical and cultural moments in China. In the episode, Belinda also discusses the ideal of education as upward mobility, the politicization in education, and how the idea of citizenship can change in the course of one’s life.

Eileen Chong reflects on her eight poetry collections and the multiple worlds that arise out of relationships, language (translating, speaking, food, numbers), and domestication, women’s labor, and her migration from Singapore to Australia. In tracing her writing trajectory (specifically, “translating” degree program requirements between countries), she discusses how her poems capture a moment in time, how she rewrites memories and narratives, and co-creation as praxis between reader and poet.

In this interview about her electric debut novel Disorientations, Elaine Hsieh Chou discusses her inspiration for writing a fictional account of academia. She traces how the storyline and characters changed as she followed the many publicized controversies in academia (sexual assault, white scholars claiming and faking marginalized identities). She also addresses whiteness and white logic, burnout culture in academia, and the anachronistic recitation of “the death of the author”.