Elizabeth Noel

Elizabeth Noel has called many places home, including the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. She holds an MEd from the University of Exeter and an MLitt from the University of Saint Andrews and has taught at various universities in the UAE. Long-listed for both the Katherine Mansfield Sparkling Prose Competition and the Anthology Short Story Competition, Noel has published various short works. She lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters, on the land of the Gayemagal people within the Eora Nation.

As a child, Noel made regular visits to see her Austrian grandmother, or Omi, who encouraged her to chew on fennel seeds, sip herbal teas, and rub strange-smelling creams onto her skin. The city of Vienna, Melk Abbey, and the mountains and glass-topped lakes of Carinthia captured her heart. Her new novel, Beneath the Edelweiss, is the result of years of questioning what happened to her grandparents and great-grandparents, piecing together a narrative of Carinthia’s complex and tragic past.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Noel's reply:

I am reading Gravity and Grace published posthumously by Simone Weil which I find both challenging and illuminating. I discovered the French philosopher, social activist and mystic while researching Beneath the Edelweiss and I could not look away from her.

I can relate to Weil’s discomfort with religious institutions and the pull she felt toward a Christian spirituality. Weil would be horrified by an age that fills every waking second with distraction via back pocket screens. Publishing a book has drawn me deeper into the pool of grace through the joy of creation and the act of self-emptying it requires, but it has also given me a better awareness of gravity. Weil talks about the dangers of “self-satisfaction over a good action (or a work of art) [which] is a degradation of higher energy.” In the quiet seconds between an approaching debut and the final acts of creation for a second novel, the outside digital world competes with inner plateaus. Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace helps me reconnect with spiritual landscapes, and the well deep within.

Visit Elizabeth Noel's website.

Q&A with Elizabeth Noel.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei whose most recent book, unMothered, unTongued (2025), won the 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the AWP Award Series. They are also the author of a fiction collection, Reveal Codes (2023), winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award; a chapbook, #stringofbeads (2023), winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition; and five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (2019), named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of The National Poetry Series. A professor emeritus of English at the University of South Dakota, they live in Atlanta, Georgia, and Laramie, Wyoming, and currently serve as a faculty mentor at the Carlow University and University of Nebraska low-residency MFA programs.

Roripaugh's new book, co-edited with Heidi Czerwiec, is The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers.

Recently I asked the writer about what she was reading. Roripaugh's reply:

I just finished reading Ruth Ozeki’s enchanting debut collection of short stories, The Typing Lady—a collection that is about, among other things, writers and readers, memory, and loss. In the closing lines of the eponymously titled opening story, “The Typing Lady,” Ozeki writes: “Stories are like that. They are collaborations between people who read and people who type. They are how we co-create each other and dream ourselves into being.” These are stories in which characters counter profound loss through intense curiosity and engagement—tracing the narrative threads of their lives backwards into past memories, as well as intrepidly turning the pages forward into surprisingly quirky, or unexpected moments. Ozeki seems to suggest that curiosity and attentiveness are how one remains present within the story of one’s life, and that books, reading, and writing, are a means by which to anchor, commemorate, and assign meaning to these stories. In the end, though, even what has been preserved in the materiality of books or printed matter are not perdurable in the face of time, as evidenced by images of silverfish eating language, and rendering typeface into an intricate lace. And yet, it’s the stories that are told, exchanged, co-created, and dreamed in the present, that seemingly give a calamitous world meaning. In the final story, the protagonist, a writer and retired English professor, says: “Books are like a rhizomatic network—a vast, subconscious fungal mat that spreads beneath human consciousness, knitting the world of thought together...” I read this book in the late summer, in my former childhood home in Laramie, Wyoming, full of my deceased parents’ hoarding, an anthropological site of memory and absence, and I was struck by the collaborative power of these stories: how they intertwined and tangled themselves within my own network of narrative threads, how they made me want to read further, how they made me want to pull the dust cover from my father’s Olivetti Studio 44 manual typewriter and type.

Visit Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh's website, and learn more about The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

KC Jones

KC Jones is a screenwriter-turned-novelist currently living in western Washington. When not writing, he can be found watching movies, playing video and board games, or enjoying nature—whenever it isn’t raining.

He graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas with a degree in film production. His first published novel, Black Tide, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a first novel.

Jones's new novel is House Haunters.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. His reply:

After finishing The Keeper by Tana French, which is scary enough in its depiction of how rumor mills can cause a small community to destroy itself long before the encroaching outside world even gets a chance, I decided to kick October off with a good old ghost story. Diavola, by Jennifer Thorne, is about a dysfunctional family reluctantly gathering for a getaway in a probably-haunted Italian villa. The contrast between the creeping dread within the walls of the increasingly sinister house and the beautiful Tuscan countryside is skin-crawlingly effective, but--at least so far--the tension between family members, the tooth-and-nail way they go at one another, is the real horror. The character dynamics are so well done and too real; I keep finding myself twisted up inside like this is my own family I’ve been forced into this unfortunate situation with. Despite being surrounded by people she ought to be able to lean on, the black-sheep narrator feels essentially alone as the horrors ramp up, which makes things all the more stressful. I’m only halfway through, but so far it’s shaping up to be one of my favorites of the year.

Visit KC Jones's website.

The Page 69 Test: White Line Fever.

Q&A with KC Jones.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elizabeth Crane

Elizabeth Crane is the author of several collections of short stories, including Turf, When the Messenger is Hot, All this Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter, a memoir, This Story Will Change, as well as two novels, We Only Know So Much and The History of Great Things.

Crane's latest story collection is That May Not Mean What You Think.

[Q&A with Elizabeth Crane]

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Crane's reply:

Currently reading and loving and almost finished with two books:

Nonfiction: Three Tenses by Ed Park.

In this book, every sentence in the book begins with the word 'in'. See what I did there? This is the kind of book I read and wish that I could ever think of such a simple but brilliant idea, and then actually execute it with the lovely, thoughtful, and often humorous prose with which Park sets it down.

Fiction: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.

I know. I was very, very late to the Neapolitan series, but now that I'm here, I am all in. I'm not sure what I can really add to the conversation about the beauty and the complexity of the prose and the story except to say I get it now, and hope I can bring a fraction of that beauty if I'm ever able to write the friendship story I wish to write someday.

Two more I read recently that I also admired greatly:

Nonfiction: Things In Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li.

This book is the exploration of the profound loss of her son(s) to suicide. Her ability to write about how we continue exist after loss is nothing less than exquisite.

Fiction: Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.

I have in recent years become a big fan of Strout, and love that her books continue to explore and develop recurring characters, or add new characters to this world, without ever feeling anything less than fresh. This book in particular felt slightly different in tone, perhaps with a wee bit more of an edge, but in a way that didn't stray from her tight, observant, recognizably concise prose, and I think it deserves all the attention it's getting right now.

Visit Elizabeth Crane's website.

Writers Read: Elizabeth Crane (April 2008).

The Page 69 Test: We Only Know So Much.

My Book, The Movie: We Only Know So Much.

Coffee with a Canine: Elizabeth Crane & Percy.

Q&A with Elizabeth Crane.

--Marshal Zeringue

Heidi Czerwiec

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord (2024), and the lyric essay collection Fluid States (2019), selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, as well as several poetry collections, including Conjoining (2017) and Self-Portrait as Bettie Page (2013). She is also the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015), and a senior editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis for the University of Minnesota, Normandale Community College, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Czerwiec's new book, co-edited with Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh, is The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers.

Recently I asked Czerwiec about what she was reading. Her reply:

I’m usually reading for several different purposes, so this grouping reflects that. Because I got in the habit of doing mini-reviews of books that I paired with perfume on Twitter, I’m going to continue that practice here.

I recently heard Aisha Sabatini Sloan read, and while I loved Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, I hadn’t read her newest, Borealis: An Essay, so I grabbed a copy. It’s a magical, funny, thoughtful book-length lyric essay about a Black, queer body moving through White spaces—in this case, the expansive glacial landscape of Alaska. I would pair this with Zoologist’s Snowy Owl, which smells cold: a woodsy base, but the icy notes of iris, mint, and green galbanum lend an austere beauty.

Because I’ll be teaching it this fall, I’m reading Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime. It’s ostensibly a memoir of growing up mixed-race in apartheid South Africa when his very existence demonstrated that racial purity is a lie, but his narrative becomes more a portrait of his Xhosa mother—a fierce force of love, faith, and rebellion who raises him during this violent era. Paired with Robert Piguet’s Bandit, whose name also suggests a crime, and whose scent wallops you with its sharp green and dry leather, all discipline up front and yet eventually softens to a floral the longer it stays with you. Also, the perfume was created by the most rebellious woman in the business.

For pleasure, I’ve just started my friend Maya Jewell Zeller’s Raised by Ferns, also a memoir of an unconventional upbringing, a feral childhood in precarity among the Pacific Northwest forests. I’m not far along, but I love the lush language and the scavenged collage of materials—housing policies, fire danger warnings, math word problems, poetic forms—all woven with lyric personal reflections. Paired with CB I Hate Perfume’s Black March, a scent that smells like wet ground awaking after winter, with notes of rain, green buds, sharp sap, and muddy earth.

And finally, for my own research and writing on mycelium, I’m…reading? perusing? marveling at?...a bizarre ‘zine called Mushroom People (there were only ever 2 volumes created) that’s a compendium of ephemera by writers, artists, scientists, folklorists, and fungi enthusiasts. I’ll pair this with Aftelier’s wonderfully weird Cepes & Tuberose, which foils a big white floral against an earthy fungal funk.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

Visit Heidi Czerwiec's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Humphrey Hawksley

Humphrey Hawksley has reported on key trends, events and conflicts from all over the world.

His work as a BBC foreign correspondent has taken him to crises on every continent.

Hawksley's new Rake Ozenna thriller is Operation Icebreaker.

Recently I asked the author about what he was reading. Hawksley's reply:

I have several on the go, all on my Kindle, and all in the swirl around my curiosity research on Arctic action.

The Wager and the Bear by John Ironmonger is a heart-warming tale about small communities and the wider world. This is one of the few novels with a setting in Qaanaaq, in far north Greenland, the Arctic area where my latest Operation Icebreaker is set. It’s a hard place to get to, and John wrote from talking to people and his own research, and his vivid descriptions are pretty much spot on.

Alongside, I’m deep into Cold Rush: The Astonishing True Story of the New Quest for the Polar North by Martin Breum, a gripping non-fiction account of the race for power in the Arctic, explaining exactly how Greenland, colonised by Denmark, fits in. I never knew that Denmark had lodged a sovereignty claim on the North Pole, and I am writing this on the day Donald Trump announced a new deal over Greenland that he had threatened to annexe!

I’m a big fan of Marc Cameron whose latest Back Track I’ve just finished with Alaskan Federal Marshall Arliss Cutter. No-one writes cold like Marc who previously did the Tom Clancy franchise. Action, cold and Alaska fit perfectly into forging the environment for my lead character, Rake Ozenna who comes from a remote Alaskan island on the Russian border.

I’ll shortly be diving into a historical Arctic non-fiction, Giles Milton’s Empire at the Edge of the World, an amazing story of Britain’s attempt to claim the remote and frozen Arctic Wrangel Island, now controlled by Russia. Giles has given us a harrowing story of greed, ambition and triumph in the harshest conditions and sits well with Breum’s modern day descriptions of Denmark trying to prove that it owns the North Pole.

Visit Humphrey Hawksley's website.

The Page 69 Test: The History Book.

My Book, The Movie: Security Breach.

My Book, The Movie: Man on Ice.

Writers Read: Humphrey Hawksley (May 2018).

The Page 69 Test: Man on Ice.

The Page 69 Test: Man on Fire.

--Marshal Zeringue

W. Jason Miller

W. Jason Miller is a Distinguished Professor and public scholar who acts as a cultural detective, unearthing the hidden connections that reshape American history. From discovering a lost recording of MLK’s first "I Have a Dream" speech to his latest revelation of the secret mentorship between Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, Miller bridges the gap between rigorous archival research and compelling public narrative.

His new book is Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: Nina Simone, Langston Hughes, and the Birth of Black Power.

Recently I asked Miller about what he was reading. The author's reply:

I was delighted when author Lerone Martin extended my earlier connection between Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and Martin Luther King, Jr. to find— through his own resourcefulness— that King began reciting Hughes’s poetry as early as ten years old when he was a 5th grade student in Miss Lemon’s class in Atlanta. For any Tina Fey | 30 Rock fans, Miss Lemon’s first name was (unbelievably) ... Elizabeth!

Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King, Jr, portrays a wide-smiling King dancing the Charleston in front of his classmates while he recites a Hughes poem about Black dancers.

As someone fascinated with birds— especially those I’ve seen all across Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Europe— The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to the Present traces our feathered friends through fossils, feather analysis, and even time-lapse images taken through the eggshell before they even hatch.

Having spent three of the last five summers hiking in New Mexico, I picked up a copy of The Jemez Mountains: A Cultural and Natural History while buying supplies at a local roadside stop. I was traveling down Highway 4, on my way to the historic Gisewatowa Pueblo. Like the land itself, the book covers ecology, sustainable forestry, ecology, geography, myth, and history. Next time you find yourself in Sante Fe or Taos, head west to Jemez Springs (after climbing up to 13,167 ft. of Wheeler Peak of course!) and hike Valles Caldera or Cerro Grande. The information in this book ensures you won’t forget it!

Visit W. Jason Miller's website.

The Page 99 Test: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

My Book, The Movie: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ryan Douglass

Ryan Douglass is the author of young adult horror novel The Taking of Jake Livingston, a New York Times bestseller and an ALA Rainbow Book List Pick; The Great Disillusionment of Nick and Jay, a reimagining of The Great Gatsby set in 1920s Harlem; and Night of Madness, a collaboration with the company behind Clown in a Cornfield. His work explores the ways young people fight to survive in hostile worlds. He lives in Atlanta with his dog and spends his free time baking ambitious desserts and scoping out true crime documentaries.

Here Douglass dreamcasts an adaptation of Night of Madness:

Right now, I’m reading Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona, and I’m loving it. I picked it up partly because of the attention-grabbing cover, and because I’d been wanting to read more fiction that was strange and uncompromising. Lapvona is a dark medieval fable about a boy named Marek whose life of poverty and abuse becomes entangled with the corrupt ruler and religious power structure of his village. It is brutal and unsettling, but also kind of funny. I love how completely Moshfegh commits to the world she creates, how the violence in the book feels embedded in the physical reality of the world rather than placed for cheap shock value. Moshfegh’s willingness to lean into discomfort has helped me develop confidence in approaching darkness in my own work. As someone who’s mostly written YA novels, I love the process of writing a book that doesn’t sanitize mature topics for the comfort of the reader.

Follow Ryan Douglass on Instagram and Threads.

Q&A with Ryan Douglass.

The Page 69 Test: Night of Madness.

My Book, The Movie: Night of Madness.

--Marshal Zeringue

Denise Derya Brandt

Denise Derya Brandt worked in international development for more than twenty years and led women’s health projects in Afghanistan, Liberia, and Myanmar before becoming a published author. A Book Incubator graduate, 2024 Women's Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award finalist, and 2025 Poets & Writers Publicity Incubator Fellow, Brandt has degrees from Arizona State and the London School of Economics. As a Turkish American, she claims she can fool tourists but not taxi drivers! Raised in Arizona, Brandt now lives in northern Kentucky with her husband. Istanbul Dreaming is her debut novel.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Brandt's reply:

I tend to read books in bursts. I may go weeks without reading a book and then I’ll read three in one week. (I tend to write this way, too). Often, I listen to audiobooks from the library, but if there is a book I’m specifically trying to learn from, either because I admire the author’s writing or because of its subject matter, I will buy and read the paperback. I currently have a huge stack of books I need to read, many authored by people I know, but I’ve been prioritizing reading library books before I have to return them. What’s that saying? “Something that can be done at any time is often done at no time.”

These are a few books I enjoyed most recently.

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi – I recently re-read this to prepare for her newest novel, The City of Widows, which is a stand-alone novel centered on the same protagonist. The novel follows Rahima, a girl in modern Afghanistan who is dressed as a boy so she can work and move freely, her story braided with that of her great-great- grandmother Shekiba a century earlier, who survives her own version of the same constraints. Nadia brings Afghan women’s stories to life. And this important story breaks your heart and frustrates you, but you cannot and should not look away. I keep coming back to Nadia’s writing because I want to learn from and emulate how she infuses culture and heart into a story.

I also love juicy memoirs and these two did not disappoint:

Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham – I wasn’t necessarily a Lena Dunham fan going in, but I heard this was a great book, so I borrowed the audiobook, which she narrates herself, from my library. It’s the first book of hers I’ve read and I was genuinely impressed. She writes about the less-than- glamorous side of fame and celebrity, tangled up with her addiction, autoimmune, and reproductive health issues she’s dealt with for years. Her metaphors are masterful, landing on the perfect image for the reader. Whether you’re a fan or not, Famesick is a great read, and it left me with a lot more empathy for her, both as a public figure and as a woman managing a body that kept betraying her.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden – Like a celebrity memoir, this one dropped me into a world I knew little about: old-money New York, inherited trust funds, a marriage that looked picture-perfect from the outside. Burden built a life around her husband’s career and then, early in the pandemic, learned from a stranger’s message that he’d been having an affair and that he wanted out of the marriage and family entirely. It reads like a novel, with enough twists that I kept trying to guess what came next. If even half of what Burden describes is accurate, she’s shown remarkable resilience through a genuinely bewildering betrayal. It’s a New York Times bestseller for a reason.

Visit Denise Derya Brandt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kasey Lansdale

Kasey Lansdale has been in the fiction world since birth as a writer, editor, audiobook narrator, and creative professional. Lansdale is based in LA and currently serves as head editor at Pandi Press. She has released numerous short stories and anthologies from publications such as Harper Collins, Titan Books, and more, and her fiction has been adapted for television and comics.

First Chance is her debut novel.

Recently I asked Lansdale about what she was reading. The author's reply:

At the moment I’m reading several novels, all of them in service of the book I am working on. Unlike some authors, I like to read what’s happening in the genre to make sure I’m hitting the marks, and also, to be sure I’m not hitting the same ones.

Jennifer Anne Gordon’s Perfect Wives Perfect Lies is the first, and it just came out September 8th, same day as my novel. This author and title have been on my highly anticipated list all year, and though I’m only a few chapters in, I can’t wait to see how it unfolds.

I’m also reading The Night Shift by Alex Finlay. It’s a mystery/thriller with a lot of twists and self discovery of the human condition. This is closer to what I usually read of the three, though that’s a broad statement.

As well as reading The Perfect Couple by Elin Hilderbrand. I don’t usually gravitate to books from multiple POVs back to back, but when done well, as this one is, it’s a lot of fun. Most of Elin’s work sits outside of my normal genre picks, but I watched the adaptation on Netflix and thought it was a fun and simple mystery. I wanted to see how it was originally written and intended, and I had not read anything from this author before. I’m really enjoying it.

Visit Kasey Lansdale's website.

--Marshal Zeringue