Interviews

FALL 2022

Christina Fernandez (1965), is a Chicana photographer based out of Southern California. For the past 30 years, she has focused her work on migration, labor, and the intersections of her gender and her Mexican-American heritage.

Interview by Ruthie Zolla (Pitzer '25)

Nobuo Kazashi is Professor Emeritus at Kobe University. He specializes in comparative philosophy and is the 1991 recipient of the American Philosophical Association’s William James Prize and the 2012 Japanese Society for Science and Technology Studies’ Kakiuchi Memorial Practice Award. In October 2022, he gave a virtual lecture at the Claremont Colleges on the poetry of different hibakusha — hibakusha being the title for Japanese survivors of the atomic bombs — and how the philosophies within their works illustrate Japan’s historical relationship to nuclear weapons.

Interview by Hannah Frasure (Pomona '24)

SPRING 2022

Sheila Heti

Dr. Genevieve Carpio

"The books I’ve been most drawn to aren’t books that are healing but books that throw me off, that break things apart and break things up and disturb me. I don’t think I go to literature to be healed, exactly, and I don’t think that’s the reason I write either."

Sheila Heti is a writer, playwright, interviewer, and an animated critic and thinker. She was named a member of "The New Vanguard" by the New York Times, a writer "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Interview by Carolyn Tung (Claremont McKenna '24).

"I always found it very stark—the inequities between places like Claremont and Pomona. I wanted to know more about how that's built into the landscape, why and what we can do about it."

A Pomona alum who grew up next door to Claremont in the city of Pomona, Dr. Carpio is critically inspired by her experience seeing inequities in her home community and desire to spark transformative social impact through her research and scholarship on the Inland Empire.

Interview by Sunny Jeong-Eimer (Pomona '25)

FALL 2021

Tom Lin

"That machine has always been used for the purpose of legitimating white male supremacy in the American West. But I think it was so much more interesting for me to go in there and see if I could turn the machine around—if I could use this mechanism to try to legitimate a different kind of American while still operating within the bounds of that genre."

Having immigrated to the United States from China at the age of four, Tom Lin attended Pomona College, where he graduated in 2018. His debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, was published in June 2021 and takes the form of a Western centered around a Chinese American outlaw. Lin is currently pursuing a doctorate in Literature at the University of California, Davis.

Interview by Aditya Gandhi (Pomona ’22)

Amanda Bennett

In this interview, Bennett shares her experiences both teaching and learning from Black feminist storytelling, particularly as it relates to building beloved community, coping with grief, accessing self-knowledge and imagining utopia.

Amanda Bennett is a writer, educator and doctoral candidate at Duke University. Her dissertation focuses on developing a “vocabulary of feeling” through Black feminist Literature, particularly the writings of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers and Assata Shakur. Bennett is also the founder of define&empower which aims to reimagine Diversity, Equity and Inclusion consulting through a lens of Black feminist imagination and creative storytelling. You can read her poetry, short fiction and essays on her blog as well as listen to her podcast Black Feminist Hotline on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Interview by Sunny Jeong-Eimer (Pomona '25)

SPRING 2021

Brandon Hobson

"I love how stories, even old myths, still have the same qualities that stories have today. I've always been interested in avant-garde fiction, which can be fragmentary and ambiguous and puts some pressure on the reader to do the work."

Brandon Hobson is an established writer whose previous novel, Where the Dead Sit Talking, was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award. He recently published his fourth novel, The Removed, a story that traces one Cherokee family’s memories of togetherness, grief, myth, and home in the modern-day U.S. In addition to being a writer, Hobson is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University, a teacher at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Interview by Aditya Gandhi

Patricia Spears Jones

"People who write about the future (other than maybe the Afrofuturism people) are really writing about now. They’re still talking about the old hierarchies and critiquing that, which is okay. I’m not asking for utopias; I’m asking, how will a future poem look like?

Patricia Spears Jones is a distinguished poet, with four poetry collections and five chapbooks to her name. She has received many accolades for her poetry, including the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize and a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and she is also a playwright, essayist, and anthologist. Elsewhere, Jones is involved with several organizations—such as The Black Earth Institute, where she is a Senior Fellow—that work toward goals of feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.

Interview by Eva Molina

FALL 2020

Alison Saar

“Instead of how the way women are always on the fainting couch [...] I was really interested in portraying women that are closer to the way I identify, and the women that I have known in my life, and so many of the powerful women out there in the world as well.”

Alison Saar, Scripps ’78, is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work in sculpture, printmaking, and other multi-media art makes use of distinctive materials in order to touch upon topics of Black female identity, mythology, and alchemy. Her exhibitions Mirror, Mirror and Of Aether and Earthe are featured this fall at Scripps College and Pomona College, respectively.

Interview by Suh Won Chang

Gracie Bialecki

"My aim with Purple Gold was to write a novel that combined scenes and ideas which were true to me, along with events I’d witnessed or had recounted. My intention wasn’t to veer into fantasy or melodrama—real life is crazy enough."

Gracie Bialecki (Pomona '12) is a writer and performance poet living in Paris. She is a monthly columnist for Epiphany Magazine, cofounder of Thirst, a gallery and storytelling series, and the author of Youth, a collection of poetry. Purple Gold is her first novel.

Interview by Ethan Widlansky

Claudia Rankine

"I'm really interested in open texts that don't really travel from A to B or X to Z, but rather are interested in the depth of a thing, how it drops down. What it touches. Proximity is all for me and how two moments activate each other."

Claudia Rankine is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwright, as well as the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Grant with which she established The Racial Imaginary Institute, a think tank for artists who wish to reflect on race as an imagined construct. She was the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College from 2005 to 2015, and currently she is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Her writing pushes traditional boundaries, as seen in 2015 when her renowned work Citizen: An American Lyric became the first book to be a finalist in two categories (poetry and criticism) in the National Book Critics Circles Award. Her most recent work, Just Us: An American Conversation, is a collection of essays, poems, and images that together ask the question of how we can communicate with one another under everyday white supremacy.

Interview by Elease Willis

SPRING 2020

Jia Tolentino

"I feel lucky to be able to write about such different things. If I'm thinking about it in my off time, if I'm thinking about it after hours, then why not, right?"

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino is among the most prominent essayists of today. Her work casts a critical eye on popular culture—from TikTok to incels—in addition to art, politics, and her own personal experience. She published her first book, a collection of essays titled Trick Mirror, in August 2019.

Interview by Aalia Thomas

FALL 2019

José Olivarez

Miriam Toews

"For me, it’s not language I’m necessarily putting my faith in, because all of my languages come from violence, from colonialism. It’s people that I put my faith in. How I can use language to build towards the people and communities that I care about is always where I end up going."

José Olivarez grew up in Illinois and was raised by Mexican immigrants. His debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal, was published September of this year. Alongside writing, Olivarez serves as Marketing Manager at Young Chicago Authors.

Interview by Becky Zhang

"Going from journalism to fiction, the common denominator was the need to step outside of the story to observe, witness, and document it."

Miriam Toews is an award-winning Canadian novelist. Raised in a Mennonite community in Steinbach, Manitoba, Toews has written numerous novels as well as Swing Low, a memoir written from her late father’s perspective. Her most recent book, Women Talking, grapples with the abuse inflicted upon women in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia.

Interview by Becky Zhang

Sehba Sarwar

"It becomes a universal story, but it is definitely specific, and it has to be specific to ring true. The characters have to be grounded in their realities and in their truths, which in most cases are based on their identities."

Sehba Sarwar is a writer, activist, and visual artist based in the greater Los Angeles community. She has worked as a journalist, educator, nonprofit founder, and more. Her work focuses on issues of immigration, borders, and displacement, with her most recent novel Black Wings continuing this conversation.

Interview by Aditya Gandhi

SPRING 2019

Sally Wen Mao

Hua Hsu

“In this life I have worshipped so many lies.
Then I workshop them, make them better.”

Sally Wen Mao is a Chinese-American poet, writer, and educator. She immigrated to the United States at a young age and has published two acclaimed poetry collections, Mad Honey Symposium and Oculus.

Interview by Becky Zhang

“I don’t want the opinion to be the thing leading the piece. I just sort of want [the reader and I] to get there together.”

Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Vassar College.

Interview by Aditya Gandhi