The Adroit Journal News Updates

There is a long tradition of journalists successfully turning to fiction: Dickens, Twain, Hemingway; and among contemporary writers, Ken Kalfus and Taffy Brodesser-Akner come to mind. Add to that list Zahid Rafiq, who spent ten years as a journalist in his native Kashmir and has just released his first collection… Read more »

In 1997, during the first wave of a reality TV deluge that remains ongoing, a cast member of MTV’s Road Rules named Holly spoke about the nickname her cast used for the crew: “Big Brother.” Holly said, “we’d be like into the radio, ‘uh Big Brother, we’re just wondering’” this… Read more »

The Zeroes—taught us—Phosphorous—  We learned to like the Fire  By playing Glaciers—when a Boy—  And Tinder—guessed—by power  Of Opposite—to balance Odd—  If White—a Red—must be!  Paralysis—our Primer—dumb—  Unto Vitality!                                           … Read more »

Steven Duong’s debut collection, At the End of the World There Is a Pond, emerges at a pivotal moment in contemporary American poetry, when questions of environmental crisis, diasporic identity, and formal innovation demand urgent attention. The collection’s sophisticated engagement with theoretical frameworks—from Édouard Glissant’s concept of errantry to Donna… Read more »

Matthew Nienow is the author of the recently released collection, If Nothing, as well as House of Water (2016), both from Alice James Books. His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and has been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Port Townsend,… Read more »

Mike Fu’s debut novel Masquerade promises a hint of mystery, a hint of meta, and a hint of magic. The novel’s protagonist—aimless, lowkey, good-natured, late-twenties bartender Meadow Liu—is house- and plant-sitting for his elusive artist friend Selma as he recovers from a romantic ghosting. Then Selma disappears, Meadow finds a… Read more »

Marguerite Sheffer is the author of The Man in the Banana Trees (University of Iowa Press, 2024) which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her stories appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Epiphany, The Adroit Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Smokelong Quarterly, and BOMB, among other magazines. She lives and teaches in… Read more »

In his debut collection, Book of Kin, Darius Atefat-Peckham states: “I want / To see what, at the tongue of a cracked bell, survives.” Atefat-Peckham is a poet deeply attuned to the cracks in the bell of language. To the “portholes,” as he refers to them, the little openings between… Read more »

Jennifer Chang and I met for this interview over video as we closed in on the darkest night of the year. It seems a disservice to describe our conversation in themes, as if one could bottle unfolding thought into neat piles: freedom; power; dreams; fragments and lyric; Asian American poetics;… Read more »

Ever since my first writing workshop, I longed to publish a book. To this end, I tried to write many—novels, stories, poems, essays. Most I managed to finish, though I succeeded in publishing none. At age fifty-six, after nearly forty years of trying, I found out that my manuscript BOOK… Read more »