From left to right: Claudia Rankine, Mary Ruefle, Michael Burkard, Victoria Chang, Arthur Rimbaud, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs

10 Prose Poems That Think Outside the Line

Poems that blur the boundaries of form, by Claudia Rankine, Louise Glück, Victoria Chang, Arthur Rimbaud, Layli Long Soldier, Mary Ruefle, and more.
A collage of poets for National Poetry Month

A Reader’s Guide to Poetry for National Poetry Month

Read poems, learn poetic forms, and discover writers in this National Poetry Month roundup.
John Steinbeck, 1935.

Returning to Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez

A literary classic doubles as data, helping scientists trace decades of ecological change in the Gulf of California.
Edgar Allan Poe by Félix Vallotton

Edgar Allan Poe’s Mechanical Imagination

Behind The Raven’s melancholy lies a theory of composition shaped by magazines, machines, and modernity.
Dana Elle Murphy

Dana Elle Murphy on Black Feminist Criticism

An interview with Dana Elle Murphy, whose work explores how drafts, fragments, and literary lineages expand our understanding of Black women’s writing.
Dorothy Parker, ca. 1935

Dorothy Parker: Sharp-Witted Writer, Bitter Professor

Dorothy Parker’s year as a visiting professor shows how a celebrated literary voice struggled to adapt to the realities of academic teaching.
The cover of The Truffle Eye by Vaan Nguyen

The Poet Who Writes About Vietnam in Hebrew

Vaan Nguyen’s poetry examines exile and memory through the lens of her family’s journey from Vietnam to Israel.
An illustration from the cover of Ted Hughes's 1968 novel The Iron Man

The Book That Became The Iron Giant

Before it was a cult classic, the Warner Bros. film began as a 1968 children’s novel by Ted Hughes, though the book and movie tell notably different tales.
Japanese settlers harvesting millet in Northern Manchuria

When the Dust Settles in Colonial Manchurian Writing

Takagi Kyōzō makes heavy use of natural imagery to decry the miserable status of the settler colonist population in Japanese-occupied Manchuria.
An illustration from Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405

Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed

Medieval European elites inherited the classical concept of friendship as something possible only for men. Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe beg to differ.