Members and friends, we hope you’re having a happy New Year! We’re kicking off 2026 with some exciting events that we think you’re going to love.
On Thursday, January 8, at 7:30 p.m. Eastern/4:30 p.m. Pacific, NBCC board member Tobias Carroll will be moderating a special discussion. What does the future of arts writing and criticism look like? At a time when local newspapers and national publications alike are cutting coverage of the arts, the answer—or, at least, one answer—might be found in the form of new publications using a newsletter-based format to reach readers. For this panel discussion, editors Daisy Alioto (Dirt), Ross Barkan (The Metropolitan Review), Maria Bustillos (Flaming Hydra), Juliet Escoria (Zona Motel), and Keith Phipps (The Reveal) will discuss the origins of their publications, their approach to covering the arts, and what they have learned about the changing landscape of cultural writing. You can register for this free event here.
And please join us on Thursday, January 15, at 7 p.m. Eastern/4 p.m. Pacific for a special conversation about poetry in translation with Arthur Sze, the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States, led by Mandana Chaffa, Vice President of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Arthur Sze has authored twelve collections of poetry, most recently Into the Hush (2025); The Glass Constellation (2021), winner of the 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize; and Sight Lines (2019), winner of the National Book Award. Further honors include the Bollingen Prize for Lifetime Achievement for American Poetry, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Sze lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw, in Santa Fe, where he served as the city’s first poet laureate. This is a free event; you can pre-register here.
Member Reviews/Essays
Noelle McManus reviewed A Fictional Inquiry by Daniele del Giudice for Necessary Fiction.
Edna Bonhomme reviewed Ellen Huet’s Empire of Orgasm for The Baffler.
Nicole Schrag reviewed A New New Me by Helen Oyeyemi for World Literature Today.
Heller McAlpin reviewed Ben Markovits’ Booker-shortlisted novel about a man at a crossroads, The Rest of Our Lives, for NPR. She also did a roundup of four superb art books about nature—Aviary: The Bird in Contemporary Photography; Wild Ocean: A Journey to the Earth’s Last Wild Coasts; Butterfly: Exploring the World of Lepidoptera; and Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers—for The Christian Science Monitor.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Lauren LeBlanc and Hamilton Cain wrote about the best fiction of 2025 for The Boston Globe.
Renée K. Nicholson’s feature-length article “Narrative Medicine: Building Bridges Between Creative Writing and Healthcare” appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, the bimonthly publication of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Her article “Clinical Encounters of the Human Kind: (Re)Visiting Story Structure and Healthcare” appeared in Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal, also in December 2025.
Charles Green reviewed Christopher W. Selna’s Memory, Memory, Go Away for Blueink Review and and Bryan Washington’s Palaver for The Gay & Lesbian Review.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Bob Dylan’s Point Blank (Quick Studies) for BookTrib.
Sean Carlson’s essay “Painting the Last Photograph: Art and Memory After Genocide with Chath pierSath,” was published in the Autumn/Winter 2025 double issue of the New England Review. The essay is print only; you can order it here. Sean’s poem “Curry soup at a Polish bakery in Tralee” was published in Crannóg (No. 63), and his poem “Elegant Spring” was published in The Irish Independent as the November 2025 New Irish Writing selection. Sean’s review of the physics lecture at doom band Earth’s recent Pawtucket concert was published in Rhode Island’s alt-monthly Motif Magazine.
Diane Josefowicz reviewed Pandora, written by Ana Paula Pacheco and translated from the Portuguese by Julia Sanches, for The Providence Eye.
Nell Beram reviewed two books for Shelf Awareness: Joan Crawford: A Woman’s Face by Scott Eyman and Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime by Sarah Weinman.
Rebecca Ruth Gould reviewed Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated, curated by Collective Antigone, for The Markaz Review.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Transformed by India by Stephen P. Huyler and I Could Be Famous by Sydney Rende for the California Review of Books.
For The Village Star-Revue, Michael Quinn reviewed The Heart of It’s a Wonderful Life by Jimmy Hawkins.
Paul Wilner reviewed Lauren Rothery’s debut novel, Television, for Alta Journal.
Tom Peebles reviewed Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko’s Secret Maps: Maps You Were Never Meant to See, from the Middle Ages to Today, on his personal blog.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Jonathan Parks-Ramage’s It’s Not the End of the World for The Gay & Lesbian Review.
David Starkey reviewed I Found Myself…The Last Dreams, written by Naguib Mahfouz and translated from the Arabic by Hisham Matar, for the California Review of Books.
Joan Silverman reviewed Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Gamefor The National Book Review.
Robert Rubsam reviewed Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Your Name Here for The Atlantic.
NBCC Vice President/Online Michael Schaub talked about the wildest book-related stories of 2025 with former NBCC Presidents Tom Beer and Megan Labrise on Kirkus Reviews’ Fully Booked podcast.
Member Interviews
Rain Taxi published Tiffany Troy’s interview “If only, heaven notwithstanding, there was an Ohio Ohio enough: An Interview with Andrew Grace.”
Dean Rader has a Q&A with the reclusive writer Thomas Sanchez, the first interview he’s granted in roughly two decades, in the most recent issue of Alta.
Member News
NBCC lifetime member Greg Sarris’ first novel, Grand Avenue, is the Alta California Book Club pick for February 2026. His essay “Why I Write” appears in the current issue of Alta, along with former NBCC board member David Ulin’s review of Grand Avenue.
Bill Marx, president of Viva la Book Review, is launching a new seminar series in early 2026 exploring the craft of book reviewing. The inaugural talk will tackle questions submitted by participants—shaping the discussion around what matters most to you.Voting for the opening seminar topics is now open through mid-January. To cast your vote, and receive updates when the series goes live, visit vivalabookreview.org/contact and sign up today.
Diane Josefowicz was interviewed by Geri Lipschultz for Writing Disorder, and a review of her recent story collection, Guardians & Saints, appeared in World Literature Today. Her forthcoming novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill, was included in Library Journal‘s May 2026 preview.
Terese Svoboda’s essay “Hitler and My Mother-in-Law (and the Slippery Terrain of Truth)” appeared in Literary Hub. The memoir was also reviewed by Deborah Scroggins for Air Mail; by Walter Cummins in the California Review of Books; and by Dawn MacDonald in Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap. An excerpt appeared as “Witch Hunts” in Evergreen Review, and it was also featured in NBCC board member Tobias Carroll’s “The 10 Books You Should Read in December” in Inside Hook.. She was interviewed by Allison Tyra for her podcast Infinite Women.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari’s short story collection, Aftershocks and Other Stories, was longlisted for the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize. Her Jayne Anne Phillips piece for Literary Hub was excerpted in Gale’s Contemporary Literary Criticism: Excerpts From Critics of the Works of Today’s Novelists, Poets, Playwrights, Short Story Writers, Scriptwriters and Other Creative Writers.
“The Last Bookstore” by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.