We’re excited to announce that applications to our Emerging Critics Fellowships are now open! The NBCC Emerging Critics Program is an interactive, participatory program guided by the philosophy that critical thought can be fostered and enriched through dialogue within a cohort of similarly-interested critics. This is an unpaid mentorship program, with opportunities to publish a review or two during the course of the fellowship year. Apply here!
Member Reviews/Essays
Heather Treseler reviewed Virginia Konchan’s Requiem, a collection of elegies for a mother and for the “Oregon Trail” generation of Xennials, for the April edition of Plume.
Rafael C. Castillo wrote about how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is still relevant after 100 years for the San Antonio Express-News.
Sean Carlson reviewed Mood Machine by Liz Pelly for Rhode Island’s alt-monthly Motif Magazine.
Diane Scharper reviewed Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness In Gilded-Age San Francisco by Gary Krist for the Washington Examiner.
Lee Rossi reviewed John Shoptaw’s Near-Earth Object for Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Meena Venkataramanan reviewed Searches by Vauhini Vara for The Washington Post.
In her Times Literary Supplement column, Irina Dumitrescu recently wrote about the challenges of being an abbess in the 8th century, and the psychological insights of Sholem Aleichem.
NBCC Membership and Tech VP Rebecca Hussey, with co-hosts NBCC member Frances Evangelista and Dorian Stuber, discussed The Trees by Percival Everett for the One Bright Book podcast.
Edna Bonhomme wrote about Zora Neale Hurston’s Herod the Greatfor The Nation.
Priscilla Gilman reviewed The 10 by E.A. Hanks for The Washington Post.
Rebecca Ruth Gould wrote about Pamela Karimi’s Women, Art, Freedomfor JSTOR Daily.
Celia McGee reviewed Peter Godwin’s new memoir, Exit Wounds, for Air Mail.
Maryanne Hannan reviewed May Young’s Walking With God Through the Valley: Recovering the Purpose of Biblical Lament in U.S. Catholic and Melody S. Gee’s We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion in Today’s American Catholic.
For her second bimonthly Translation Spotlight column at The Arts Fuse, former NBCC board member Tess Lewis reviewed three books of oblique self-reflection Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Marcie R. Rendon’s Broken Fields for BookTrib.
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cory Oldweiler wrote about Natalia García Freire‘s new novel, A Carnival of Atrocities, translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Richard Kreitner’s Fear No Pharaoh for the Forward.
Jim Schley reviewed three recent books of poems by Julia C. Alter, Margaret Draft, and Stephen Cramer in Seven Days.
Member Interviews
Ploughshares Interim Editor-in-Chief John Skoyles was interviewed for Lit Mag News.
Adam M. Lowenstein interviewed Elaine Weiss about her new book, Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, for his newsletter, Reframe Your Inbox.
NBCC Vice President of the Barrios Prize and Co-Vice President of Membership Mandana Chaffa interviewed Danez Smith about their collection Bluff for The Brooklyn Rail‘s New Social Environment.
For their Book Cougars podcast, NBCC member Chris Wolak and Emily Fine spoke with Ruth Franklin about her new book, The Many Lives of Anne Frank.
“I have heard Moby-Dick described as a vessel that allows Melville to lavish attention on whales. I wanted Sky Daddy to do the same for planes,” Kate Folk told NBCC Co–Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari in their Literary Hub conversation about her first novel, Sky Daddy.
Eric Olson profiled crime author Matthew Sullivan for The Seattle Times.
Zelda Zerkel Morris talked with Alice Austen about her debut novel, 33 Brugman Place, which is set during the Nazi invasion of Belgium, for The National Book Review.
Member News
Jake Casella Brookins is a finalist for two Hugo Awards: as the publishing editor of The Ancillary Review of Books, and as the host of the podcast A Meal of Thorns.
Tahneer Oksman was part of an initiative, in part sponsored by The University of Michigan, of scholars, teachers, and critics recording 15-minute videos about the eight most banned books. Tahneer discussed The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, written by Margaret Atwood and adapted and illustrated by Renée Nault; her video is the sixth down here.
Rebecca Foust‘s new book, You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems (Backbone Press, 2024) won a first place in the California chapter of the 2025 National Federation of Press Women’s Prize and has been forwarded on to the national competition. Joyce Peseroff reviewed it for the March/April 2025 edition of On the Seawall.
Susan Shapiro will be moderating three upcoming New York City-area writing and publishing panels in April. On April 22, she will be moderating the Secrets of Publishing panel, featuring Alia Hanna Habib, Kate McKean, Pronoy Sarkar; Emi Ikkanda, Krishan Trotman, and Lester Fabian Braithwaite, at P&T Knitwear in New York at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. On April 26, she will be moderating the From Page to Picture panel, featuring Brendan Deneen, Caren Lissner, and Thaddeus Rutkowski at the Montclair State University Presentation Hall at 3:30 p.m. Eastern. And on April 29, she will be moderating another Secrets of Publishing panel, featuring Kevin Nguyen, Anjali Singh, Joy Peskin, Brett Krutzsch, Holly Baxter, Miya Lee, and Nick Ciani at the NYU Bookstore at 6 p.m. Eastern.
“book sale loot” by Ginny is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.