Interviews
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The Two Worlds of Playwright L.B. Browne
photo by Olga Prudka
by John Kazanjian
On the eve of her trip to Mackinac Island, Michigan, I ask playwright and novelist L.B. Browne if her new Off-Broadway play, Safe House, reflects anything of her own experience growing up. She obfuscates: “As an artist, it’s difficult not to incorporate your formative years in your art, consciously or subconsciously.” For a moment, I consider pressing her, but instead, I wish her a safe trip. To some degree, I know the answer. Since 2019, we’ve been close friends. We met as students in The New School’s MFA in Creative Writing Program,
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Global Voices: A conversation with Iranian poet Ali Asadollahi
by LIT Translation Editor J.P. Apruzzese
Introduction
For more than two decades, Iranian poet, translator, and editor Ali Asadollahi has been quietly expanding the possibilities of contemporary Persian poetry. The author of six poetry collections, he has written across free verse, haiku, visual poetry, and other experimental forms, guided by a restless commitment to exploration rather than any single aesthetic program. Alongside his own work, he has devoted himself to translation, introducing contemporary world poetry to Persian readers while helping bring Persian literature into conversation with audiences beyond Iran.
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Poetic Inquiry: poetry editor Richard Berwind interviews poetry co-editor Rebecca Endres /// Rebecca Endres interviews poetry co-editor Richard Berwind
Richard Berwind and Rebecca Endres are the current Poetry Editors at LIT and both graduated from The New School’s Creative Writing Masters Program in Poetry at different times in the program’s life: Richard in ’22, and Rebecca in ’18. To celebrate National Poetry Month, both sent questions to each other to discuss their time working at LIT, their inspirations for the poetic genre, as well as other fun yet funky questions about their special interests in writing. The interview goes as follows:
Richard Berwind: Poetry is one of our most ancient mediums of storytelling.
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An interview with Robert Polito and an excerpt from “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace”
by Charlotte Slivka
Robert Polito’s After the Flood: inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace is encyclopedic in scope with a poet’s narration. It breaks down Bob Dylan’s career during the years 1991 – 2024 and conjures the shape of his resurgence from the underworld after receiving the Grammy’s Lifetime Achievement Award; an award intended to honor him and bury him under a monument to his past simultaneously. What should have happened next in the wake of acceptance was the convenient hush of a great musician who had had a good run, then relegated to the pasture of cultural history,
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Dialogue Between Authors and Translators: an interview with Peruvian poet Roxana Crisólogo and translator Kim Jensen
by LIT Translation Editor John P. Apruzzese
Noise, in poetry, is rarely only noise. It is the residue of migration, the pressure of history, the friction between languages that refuse to settle into a single meaning. In this LIT Global Voices conversation, Peruvian–Finnish poet Roxana Crisólogo and United States poet and translator Kim Jensen meet in that charged space where poetry, politics, and translation converge, not as separate practices, but as forms of attention. We were honored to publish Jensen’s translations of Crisólogo’s poems from her collection Kauneus (Beauty) in LIT 41 (Fall 2025).
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An interview with Alexa Yasemin Brahme (MFA ’22) on her debut novel “Good News”
by LIT Interviews and Books Editor Jonathan Kesh
Good News, the debut novel by Alexa Yasemin Brahme, weaves a web of many different topics from art to immigrant families to dissections of womanhood, but the title reflects the central focus of a young artist waiting for things to get better.
The novel follows a struggling painter named Maggie — although her family and a certain ex-boyfriend know her by her Turkish name, Müjde — as several points of stress in her life converge at once. Her studio art MFA is reaching its end,
