At the center of Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s startling, gorgeous, debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree are two voices. One is Chula, only seven years old, a young girl living in a gated community in Bogotá, Colombia, who experiences the conflict of the Escobar years
When I Skype-called Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, debut author of Friday Black, we talked about family. We began with the families in his collection, from the father whose writer son drives him into the mystic-bureaucratic maze of “The Hosptial Where,” to the mother who, when the
Gold Wake Press is an independent literary press, publishing four to six titles per year. To date, the press has produced over forty books of poetry, memoir, and fiction, including titles such as This is Not About Birds, by Nick Ripatrazone, Robinson Alone, by Kathleen Rooney,
“One thing that I like about Radio Ambulante is how broad the experiences are, how different they are, and how we can narrate life in these different places, and satisfy our curiosity about the differences between these places. The specificity of the stories we tell I find to be one of the most rewarding parts of the project.”
“When I teach, my analogy is that fiction is a huge tree while poetry is a bonsai. It’s immensely helpful to toggle between working on different scales. Fiction helps me infuse my poems with narrative. Poetry makes my fiction more deft, descriptive, and concise.”