Erica Wright

Erica Wright's latest crime novel The Blue Kingfisher is filled with "substance, entertainment, and chills-a-plenty" according to The Seattle Review of Books. Her debut, The Red Chameleon, was one of O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Summer 2014. She is also the author of the poetry collections Instructions for Killing the Jackal and All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned. She is the poetry editor and a senior editor at Guernica Magazine as well as a former editorial board member for Alice James Books.

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

I started Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway on a Megabus from Atlanta to Knoxville. Twizzlers, Coke Zero, and multiple uninterrupted hours of reading time. Minus the questionable bathroom, it was pretty close to a perfect afternoon. Which is to say, I’ve been looking forward to the new Gran novel for five years, and The Infinite Blacktop was worth the wait. The novel follows the world’s best private investigator: the broken, irrepressible, unapologetically unlikable Claire DeWitt. There are three interlaced mysteries, and one gives readers a clearer view of DeWitt’s background, specifically her only unsolved case, the disappearance of her best friend when they were both still teenagers. Gran writes like no other, smoothly taking the turns on this wild ride of a novel.

Hala Alyan’s new collection of poems The Twenty-Ninth Year weaves the political with the personal to create a compelling meditation on our world. In “Step Eight: Make Amends,” she examines the particulars of a marriage as well as the larger concept of mercy. It ends with a command: “You wake up everyone you know in America.” The line feels like plea and prayer at once, not a nudge but a gut punch that asks us if we’re paying attention. And if not, these poems can show us how.

Visit Erica Wright's website.

--Marshal Zeringue