Members and friends, we’d like to remind you that the deadline to apply to our Emerging Critics Fellowships is this Saturday, May 10! 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
Chris Barsanti wrote a roundup of four new graphic novels for The Minnesota Star-Tribune.
Former NBCC President Tom Beer wrote about new memoirs by Graydon Carter, Keith McNally, and Prabal Gurung for Kirkus Reviews.
Lisa Russ Spaar reviewed new books by stephanie roberts and Sarah V. Schweig in her latest Second Acts column for The Adroit Journal.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Lauren LeBlanc reviewed The Director, written by Daniel Kehlmann and translated from the German by Ross Benjamin, for The Boston Globe.
For The Tangential, Jay Gabler reviewed 501 Essential Albums of the ’80s, edited by Gary Graff.
Edna Bonhomme wrote about Artie Vierkant and Beatrice Adler-Bolton’s Health Communism for The New York Review of Books.
Charles Green reviewed Worldwise: Edouard Roditi’s Twentieth Century, edited by Robert Schwartzwald and Sherry Simon, for The Gay & Lesbian Review.
Robert Rubsam wrote a translation roundup for The Washington Post, writing about Journey to the Edge of Life, written by Tezer Özlü and translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely; The Unworthy, written by Agustina Bazterrica and translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses; The Frog in the Throat, written by Markus Werner and translated from the German by Michael Hofmann; and The Living and the Rest, written by José Eduardo Agualusa and translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.
World Poetry Review published a selection of Yana Kane’s translations of wartime and prewar poems by a Ukrainian poet, Dmitry Blizniuk.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Marshall Karp’s Don’t Tell Me How to Die, David Sheff’s Yoko: A Biography, and Binnie Kirschenbaum’s Counting Backwards for BookTrib.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Lori Ostlund’s story collection Are You Happy? for The Minnesota Star Tribune.
For The Gay & Lesbian Review, Michael Quinn reviewed The Theatrical Adventures of Edward Gorey by Carol Verburg.
Nell Beram reviewed three books for Shelf Awareness: The Mother: A Graphic Memoir by Rachel Deutsch; The Mystery of the Crooked Man by Tom Spencer; and The World of Nancy Kwan: A Memoir by Hollywood’s Asian Superstar by Nancy Kwan.
Frank Freeman reviewed Jane Brox’s In the Merrimack Valley: A Farm Trilogy for the Portland Press Herald.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed Lovers of Franz K., written by Burhan Sönmez and translated from the Kurdish by Sami Hêzil, for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Jean Gazis reviewed Robert C. Bordone and Joel Salinas’ Conflict Resilience: Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In and Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor’s AI Snake Oil: What AI Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference for PracticalEcommerce.
Jeff Alessandrelli reviewed the poet Bret Shepard’s second collection, Absent Here, for Rain Taxi.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Robert Raasch’s The Summer Between for The Gay & Lesbian Review and Yigit Turhan’s Their Monstrous Hearts for Shelf Awareness.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed Aidan Ryan’s I Am Here You Are Not I Love You for The Brooklyn Rail.
Member Interviews
Laura Villareal interviewed editor and translator Leo Boix about Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry for Letras Latinas Blog 2.
Former Poet Laureate of the City of Los Angeles Lynne Thompson spoke with Lee Rossi about her new book, Blue on a Blue Palette, as well as her time as laureate of the country’s second largest city, for Poetry Flash.
DW McKinney profiled food justice advocate and urban farmer Cheyenne Kyle for Desert Companion.
Anne Charles interviewed lesbian feminist playwright Carolyn Gage about her most recent play, Restell, the Vermont cable access-show All Things LGBTQ.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Christine Pride for Publishers Weekly.
NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn interviewed Michael Luo, author of Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America, for Kirkus Reviews.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari talked about Guadalupe Nettel about capturing the (vaguely) surreal side of contemporary life in her new collection of speculative fiction, The Accidentals, for Literary Hub.
For the Duluth News Tribune, Jay Gabler interviewed Peter Geye about his novel A Lesser Light.
Member News
Stephanie Gorton’s The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry That Brought Birth Control to America has been shortlisted for the Plutarch Award for the year’s best biography.
On May 6, the University of Wisconsin Press will publish Anthony Bukoski’s short story collection The Thief of Words.
Laura Villareal is co-editing a new Latinx poetry anthology with Diannely Antigua, called We Come from Everything: Poetry for the 21st Century, which will be published by Graywolf Press in 2027.
Martha Anne Toll’s second novel, Duet for One, a musical love story, comes out May 6, 2025.
The unscripted TV show that Grant Faulkner has been working on as an executive producer, America’s Next Great Author, is set to go into production later this year. It will premiere in 2026. The show is being distributed by Kanopy, an on-demand streaming video platform for public and academic libraries, and will be its first original television series. People magazine made the announcement. Also, Grant has launched Memoir Nation with his Write-minded podcast co-host, Brooke Warner, and they’ve also rebranded the podcast to be Memoir Nation.
Yana Kane read her poetry translations from Russian at two presentations dedicated to the work of the Kopilka project. Kopilka is a curated repository of current work by Russophone poets from Ukraine, Russia, and the Russophone diaspora who stand for freedom and oppose Putin’s war against Ukraine. It includes translations of selected poems by members of an associated international group of literary translators. Dislocation (Slavica Press, Indiana University, 2024) is an anthology of poems with English translations drawn from Kopilka. Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations 2025 includes Yana’s translation of a poem by Dmitry Blizniuk.
“Kramerbooks” by Bill Couch is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.