Author Spotlight

A. J. Bermudez is an award-winning author and filmmaker based in Los Angeles and New York. She’s “attracted to stories in which extremely intelligent characters are thrown into subservience, stories that track an arc from non-agency to agency. And the most interesting stories to me are both literal and figurative.”

Read Bob Hicok’s poems from Vol. 35.1 here. He has this to say about his work, “My poems only have meaning for me while I’m writing them: I rarely go back to them unless I’m putting a book together, and mostly have a relationship with their birth. Writing poems is my job — job in the best sense: something I like to do, that makes me feel more” connected to life — so the existence of these poems, especially the first two, means I did my job on the days they were written.

Read Sayantika’s essay “Mother Tongue” from Vol. 35.1 here. As Sayantika says, “This essay comes from a very special place: my mother. She was insistent on giving me all the opportunities that she missed, and one of them was going to an English-medium school. On the other hand, she also kept me grounded, and I believe this essay comes from there. My mother was elated to see this essay, but unfortunately, she suffered a stroke just a few days after publishing it, which has been debilitating for her. She is recovering slowly right now.”