Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei
This week our New York City team caught up with mensah demary, the co-founder of Specter magazine, a literary platform for women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community. In addition to his leadership at Specter, mensah is a poet, columnist, and fiction and nonfiction writer.
Listen to the full episode here:
In this episode, mensah tells Kristin about the conception of Specter, based on a practical vision to bring the work of marginalized writers to light. They discuss its creation, editorial vision, and plans for the future, as well as mensah’s personal literary adventures.
I can’t overstate the importance of the internet and having social media at my disposal. I can’t overstate its importance to Specter and to my writing career. Without it, it would’ve been much more difficult to build up a readership for both myself and for Specter, and more importantly, or maybe just as importantly, it would’ve been much more difficult to build up a support system of like-minded individuals: whether you write similarly to them or not, just having people around who understand the process…
 
ABOUT OUR GUEST
mensah demary is editor in chief of Specter Magazine, and is a columnist for Fourculture Magazine. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Metazen, Little Fiction, PANK, Thought Catalog, and elsewhere. Originally from New Jersey, mensah currently lives and writes in Brooklyn.

mensah demary – Specter Magazine

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Late Night Debut, hosted by Amber Keller
This month we feature Shobha Rao’s debut short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, published by Flatiron Books. Kirkus Reviews calls it “stunning and relentless,” saying that the stories focus on “how the actions of those in power affect vulnerable women and children on both sides of the divide.”
Act 1: Host Amber Keller covers entertaining book culture news and cool new debuts
Act 2: Kjerstin Johnson and Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt discuss Shobha Rao’s debut
Act 3: Kjerstin Johnson speaks with Shobha Rao about using multiple points of view, tapping into your rage, writing about a time of conflict, and the value of endurance



 
Purchase An Unrestored Woman on IndieBound
GIVEAWAY: WIN A FREE COPY OF RAO’S DEBUT.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE FOR DETAILS, THEN EMAIL
AMBER@LATENIGHTLIBRARY.ORG BY
MIDNIGHT ON APRIL 1.
ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:
Shobha Rao moved to the U.S. from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, awarded by Nimrod International Journal. Her story “Kavitha and Mustafa” was chosen by T.C. Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015. She lives in San Francisco.
ABOUT OUR CO-HOSTS:

Kjerstin Johnson is a writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. She was editor in chief of the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture and currently is web editor at The Masters Review, a platform for emerging writers. She has a master’s in book publishing from Portland State University, where she currently teaches writing and editing.
 
 

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt is a professor in the department of English and Creative Writing at Linfield College, Oregon. Dutt-Ballerstadt specializes in postcolonial literature and theory, and also coordinates the Gender Studies Program at Linfield. Her book, The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant was published in 2010.


Shobha Rao – An Unrestored Woman

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Kristin Maffei

Featured Guest: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib 

Tonight, Kristin speaks with debut author Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib about his upcoming book of poetry, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, which you can purchase at AWP next week. They also discuss essay writing and Hanif’s new job as a columnist for MTV.
ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. He is a poetry editor at Muzzle Magazine, a columnist at MTV News, and a Callaloo creative writing fellow. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, is being released in 2016 by Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press.







Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib – The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Paul Martone
March Book Club Selection! This month we feature Barbara Roether’s debut novel, This Earth You’ll Come Back To, published by McPherson & Company. Conversation topics: social class & identity, generational relationships, mother/daughter relationships, communal living, and more. 

Join the LNL Book Club for $9.99/month
Purchase This Earth You’ll Come Back To at IndieBound
ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:

Barbara Roether is a writer and teacher based in San Francisco. She has lived and worked in Morocco and Indonesia. Before teaching, she worked in book publishing as an editor and freelance writer, and has contributed to many books on travel and religion. As an editor at HarperCollins, she created Signs of the Sacred, a series of visual books on religious ritual. She is the author of a poetry collection,The Middle Atlas, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. She is a mother, a novice surfer, and is married to the journalist Mark MacNamara.







Barbara Roether – This Earth You’ll Come Back To

Late Night Debut, hosted by Amber Keller
February Book Club Selection! This month we feature Lina Meruane’s English-language debut, Seeing Red, published by Deep Vellum. “This is a penetrating autobiographical novel,” says Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “and for English-language readers this work serves as a stunning introduction to a remarkable author.”
Act 1: Host Amber Keller covers entertaining book culture news and cool new debuts
Act 2: Nathalie Handal and Megan McDowell discuss Lina Meruane’s debut
Act 3: Nathalie Handal speaks with Lina Meruane about what’s in a name, writing from real events, and all the things that go into how we see and how we are seen



 
Join the LNL Book Club for $9.99/month
Purchase Seeing Red at IndieBound
GIVEAWAY: WIN A FREE COPY OF MERUANE’S DEBUT.
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE FOR DETAILS, THEN EMAIL
AMBER@LATENIGHTLIBRARY.ORG BY
MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 6.



ABOUT OUR FEATURED AUTHOR:
Lina Meruane (born in Santiago, Chile, 1970), novelist, essayist, and cultural journalist, is one of the most prominent and influential voices in Chilean contemporary literature. Meruane is a former Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient. She received her PhD in Latin American Literature from NYU, where she is currently a professor.
ABOUT OUR CO-HOSTS:

Nathalie Handal’s recent books include The Republics, which Patricia Smith lauds as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers”; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award.
 
 
Megan McDowell is a Spanish-language literary translator from Kentucky whose work includes books by Alejandro Zambra, Arturo Fontaine, Mariana Enriquez, Álvaro Bisama, and Juan Emar. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, McSweeney’s, Mandorla, and Vice, among others. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

Lina Meruane – Seeing Red

Late Night Conversation, hosted by Paul Martone
Featured guests: Michael McGregor and John Beer
Michael N. McGregor is an author, journalist, editor, teacher and writing consultant based in Portland, OR.  A professor of English and Creative Writing at Portland State University, he holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York and a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon.

 
 
A companion piece to Thomas Merton’s bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax tells the story of Merton’s best friend and early spiritual inspiration. Written by a close friend of Lax, Pure Act gives an intimate view of a friendship and a life that affected Merton in profound ways. It was Lax, a daringly original poet himself, who encouraged Merton to begin writing poetry and Lax who told him he should desire to be a saint rather than just a Catholic. To the end of Merton’s life, Lax was his spiritual touchstone and closest friend.
Purchase Pure Act: the Uncommon Life of Robert Lax at IndieBound 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ALSO FEATURING . . .

John Beer is the author of the poetry collection The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the chapbook Lucinda (2013). Associative and imaginative, Beer’s work has been praised for its “passionate and watchful” moods, in the words of Norma Farber judge Bin Ramke. Ramke called The Waste Land and Other Poems “full of the most amazing engagements.”

Michael McGregor – Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

Late Night Library

mensah demary – Specter Magazine

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