Ten Questions

“Get ready for about fifteen drafts.” —Garrard Conley, author of All the World Beside

“Growth shouldn’t only happen on the page.” —Zefyr Lisowski, author of Girl Work

“For every book, different literary angels perch on my shoulder.” —Tomás Q. Morín, author of Where Are You From: Letters to My Son

“Your instinct to wait to publish is right. You only get one debut.” —Omotara James, author of Song of My Softening

“Don’t stop writing, no matter what.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Root Fractures

“I tend to expect the path to be straightforward. It seldom is.” —Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light

“By the time I finished I actually felt that the topic had chosen me.” —Erika Howsare, author of The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors

“Writing kept me grounded, but it also reopened some wounds.” —Melissa Rivero, author of Flores and Miss Paula

“I’m very much a write-when-it-comes kind of writer.” —Kimberly Grey, author of A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing

“Never assume the reader is not as intelligent as you are.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Vulnerables

“I was writing this hybrid lyric thing that was hard to fall into a rhythm with at first.” —Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones, author of The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History