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Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States from India. Her essay collection, Another Appalachia, attempts to reconcile her nostalgia for the place she grew up with the troubling realities of unemployment and addiction that confront the state today, while exploring how the lessons she learned in childhood continue to shape her identity in the present.

Avashia has been a history and Civics teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003, and often writes opinion pieces and commentary regarding her experiences as an educator. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere.

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Leslie Brody is a creative writing professor, playwright, and biographer. She is the author of Irrepressible, her biography of Jessica Mitford, and Sometimes You Have to Lie, her biography of Louise Fitzhugh, author of Harriet the Spy. In addition to her works of biography, Leslie Brody has written a memoir, Red Star Sister, which received the PEN Center USA West Award, and co-authored a book of essays with Gary Amdahl, entitled A Motel of the Mind. She has held International Writing Fellowships at Hawthornden in Scotland and the Camargo Foundation in France. In the U.S. she’s been an artist-in-residence/fellow at the McDowell Colony, Centrum, Yaddo, Red Cinder Colony, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Arts. Brody received her MA and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Since 1998, she has taught Creative Nonfiction in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Redlands.

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Melissa Febos is the author of the memoir Whip Smart and the essay collections Abandon Me and Girlhood. She also has a craft book forthcoming from Catapult in 2022. Febos was the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, and her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, Lenny Letter, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. She curated the Mixer Reading and Music Series in Manhattan for ten years and served on the Board of Directors for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts for five. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, Febos is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

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Koa Beck is the author of White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind . Beck is the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel and co-host of “The #MeToo Memos” on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Previously, she was the executive editor of Vogue.com and the senior features editor at MarieClaire.com, and she was a guest editor for the 2019 special Pride section of The New York Times commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Beck’s literary criticism and reporting have appeared in TheAtlantic.com, Out, TIME, TheGuardian.com, Esquire.com, Vogue.com, MarieClaire.com, among others. Her short stories have been published in Slice, Kalyani Magazine, and Apogee Journal. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and serves on the board of directors of Nat.Brut, an art and literary magazine, as well as on the advisory board of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. In 2019, Koa was awarded the Joan Shorenstein Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, publishing an academic paper entitled “Self-Optimization in the Face of Patriarchy: How Mainstream Women’s Media Facilitates White Feminism.” She lives in Los Angeles with her wife.

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Myriam Gurba is a writer and artist. She is the author of the memoir Mean, a New York Times editors’ choice. O, The Oprah Magazine, ranked Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Publishers’ Weekly describes Gurba as having a voice like no other. Her essays and criticism have appeared in TheParis Review, TIME.com, and 4Columns. She has shown art in galleries, museums, and community centers. Gurba is also one of the founding members of The Brick House Cooperative. She lives in Long Beach, California, with herself.

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Meredith Talusan is an award-winning transgender author, journalist, and editor based in New York. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Prospect, BuzzFeed, and Vice. She is the founding executive editor of them., Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ platform, where she is now contributing editor. She is the author of the memoir Fairest. Follow her on Twitter: @1demerith.

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When I finished Julian K. Jarboe’s debut short story collection Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel, I was struck by how well they captured a world that was ours, but not quite ours. All the fears, anxieties, and terrors were painfully real, but transposed onto a universe that was both familiar and not. Immersed in Jarboe’s stories, I had that sense of being in a dream––one where you know you’re in your childhood home but it doesn’t look like the house you grew up in. I both recognized and didn’t recognize the places in Jarboe’s stories: a gentrified neighborhood now under water thanks to climate change felt a lot like Boston’s Seaport district, a version of the early 2000s where kids can time-travel back to try to rescue parents from the Twin Towers on 9/11, an America where the job market has become so dire that people are emigrating to the moon to find work, a rural home surrounded by fairies who steal human babies and replace them with changelings while parents wonder if maybe not vaccinating their babies would stop the fairies.

By the time Jarboe and I spoke on the phone a couple weeks after I’d finished reading, though, I was having trouble recognizing the world I lived in. Handshakes, hugs, and kisses were things of the past; people were bumping elbows instead, then keeping six feet apart, then avoiding each other all together. I was communicating with friends who lived down the street through Google Hangouts. I couldn’t see my parents and grandparents even though they only live a couple towns over. Doorknobs, light switches, phones, keys, elevator buttons, credit cards, and mail had become dangerous. Everyone was wearing gloves and masks. Stores were depleted of the most basic goods. Many of us were now working from home, exclusively communicating through screens; the most vulnerable and poor still had no choice but to continue going to work. It was a place I at once recognized but also didn’t; I felt as if I had been transported directly into one of Jarboe’s stories.

It seems appropriate that Jarboe’s publication date for Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel was March 5, in the middle of this pandemic. This collection of stories is more than a clever take on the world we live in, reimagining our everyday problems with fairies and monsters, science fiction and myth. We spoke recently about how the places where we grow up influences our work, how to make sense of the world we live in now, and how to imagine a new and better kind of universe.

To keep reading the interview, head over to The Rumpus.

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Sasha Geffen is a writer based in Denver whose work appears in Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NPR, The Nation, and others. Their first book, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary, about the history of pop music as a vessel for gender nonconformity, was published by the University of Texas Press in April 2020.

(Also, fun fact: E.B. and Sasha went to high school together.)

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Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Machado’s essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Machado is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

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For the full interview, see it on Fiction Advocate.
Published on January 9, 2019.

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Maggie Nelson is a highly acclaimed poet, art critic, nonfiction writer, and professor. She is the author of several books including The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial, Jane: A Murder, Bluets, and The Argonauts. Her work has received much recognition including the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Argonauts in 2016 and most recently she received the MacArthur Fellowship. She currently teaches at USC in the English department.

This month’s guest Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviewer is Annie Dade. Annie is a Boston-based admirer of nonfiction, blended memoirs, and storytelling as a tool for social change. As both a student and a teacher, she has found deep appreciation for the craft in conversation with other writers whether they are third grade poets or college professors. She is grateful to speak with one of her favorite writers in this interview.

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