For National Poetry Month, we asked Tsahai Makeda to sit down with Asa Drake, whose debut poetry collection, Maybe the Body, was released on February 24, 2026, from Tin House.
This is their conversation.
Continue reading “Asa Drake on Maybe the Body, Poetry, and the Search for Home”
I thought this was going to be an essay about how adventure books help me sleep (I find it terribly difficult to sleep), but as I was choosing which books to include, I realized something else bound these books: there is a wisdom to the authors. Their stories – which range from raising orphaned grizzly cubs in Russia to meditating alone in a Himalayan cave for over a decade – tend to start from a place of fear: fear of solitude, of discomfort, of cold weather, of shoddy bedding and meager rations and avalanches and wildfires and poachers and all the sorry and terrifying things of the world. But over time, that fear becomes acceptance, and love, for the world as it is. That is freedom, to be humbled by the world until one truly feels one’s connection to it.
But what does this have to do with my debut novel Hovel, where the narrator is living in the mountains but not exactly raising grizzly cubs? (Her job involves editing internet videos of kittens doing cute things.) Really, she is not feeling so connected to the world. Yet that changes as she embarks on the smallest of adventures – cooking by candlelight, peeing in the woods, foraging in places where foraging definitely isn’t allowed. It is transgressive, in this day and age, to do even these small things. Yet adventure books like the following make me believe probing the world from as many new angles as possible does have meaning.
Continue reading “Five Adventure Books Where the Journey Is About Humility Recommended by Ailsa Ross”
The following is an excerpt from Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill. She is a writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her spouse and three children and has had her writing appear in Strange Horizons, Vastarien, ergot., PANK, and multiple award-winning anthologies. This is her first novel.
Wife Shaped Bodies is about an isolated young bride, raised under rigid rules and covered in fungal growths, who begins to unravel both her body and her beliefs after entering a controlling marriage. As she forms a dangerous connection with another woman, she uncovers buried truths about her community and confronts her own autonomy, desire, and transformation. It is now available from Saga Press.
Continue reading “Read an excerpt from Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill “
As I set out to write my own, I read many elegies of classic and contemporary poetry, memoir, and hybrid texts with visual art. The elegy is as old as literature itself, but the form has been reinvented again and again in our attempt to make meaning of loss, honor the deceased, and to get as close as we can to conveying the experience of grief—something that thousands of years later remains out of our grasp, just beyond the reaches of language. Here are seven of my favorites.
Continue reading “Seven Elegiac Books Recommended by Leigh Lucas”
Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Julie Gourinchas is a literary agent at Bell Lomax Moreton in the UK. Writers she works with have won or been nominated for the British Book Awards, the Hugo Awards, the Stoker Awards, the BSFA Awards, the Betty Trask Award, and the Saltire National Book Awards, among others.
We dug into why she loves “weird girl lit,” the differences between agent work in the US and the UK, and why she’s an atmospher-first reader.
Continue reading “Question & Agent: Julie Gourinchas of Bell Lomax Moreton”
Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Mariah Stovall is the author of I Love You So Much, It’s Killing Us Both, one of Debutiful’s Best Debut Books of 2024 (and our conversation remains a Top 10 most-listened to podcast episode in our history). She’s also a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management, where she represents everything from literary and upmarket fiction to narrative nonfiction covering arts, history, STEM, linguistics, sports, and philosophy, including Oye by Melissa Mogollon, another Best Debut Book of 2024.
We dug into a long list of what pitches are oversaturated, how publishing isn’t meritocracy nor a circle jerk, and how she balances writing fiction as an author and representing it as an agent.
Continue reading “Question & Agent: Mariah Stovall of Trellis Literary Management”
Poets & Writers has announced the 2026 poetry fellows cohort for Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early-career writers. The program gives selected writers an opportunity to work with an experienced book publicist who will guide them in leveraging the opportunity presented by their first or second major book publication.
Continue reading “Announcing the 2026 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out Poetry Fellows”
Honey in the Wound by Jiyoung Han weaves a story of broken silences in the wake of brutality and the connections that give voice to those silences. Magical moments live in the tears that grow into grass and a tiger that can rescue, but not save, the fate of her human family. And in the way mothers attend to each other while their dead children’s ghosts cry out. And in the transformation of gifts into love, resistance, and freedom.
Not until Young-Ja unearths the swell of grief for the granddaughter who resembles her long-gone father does she start to free herself from the merciless shame of her enslavement. Grandmother and granddaughter lift the veil to show that silence is never silent.
These forgotten women who were used as stock to help men forget their brutalities or provide relief to soldiers, finally use their bodies to protest the lapses in history’s memory and their words to help us all “learn and unlearn” and to show “how beliefs are made and taught.”
As much as I wanted Young-Ja to talk, I felt protective of all she’d been through and understood if she chose silence. I also rejoiced when the wisdom of young Rinako, simply wanting to be near her grandmother, allowed Young-Ja to finally release her voice, her tears, and her story.
Continue reading “Magical Realism as Resistance: Jiyoung Han on Honey in the Wound”
Welcome to Debutiful’s Agent Week! We gathered some of our favorite literary agents representing the most exciting debut books and asked them questions about what makes them love a submission, their agenting style, and the books they’re working on.
Emma Dries is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Outside, Lit Hub, Bookforum, and Dwell. As an agent for Triangle House, her clients have published at imprints including. Alfred A. Knopf, Doubleday Books, and Ecco. The first book she sold was the debut breakout The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis.
We dug into what stands out in query letters, her approach with editorial as an agent, and why climate fiction is so important.
Continue reading “Question & Agent: Emma Dries from Triangle House”
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Continue reading “Debutiful Podcast: Miranda Shulman discusses Harmless”