I just have to tell you that I had to Google Cordwainer Smith (see Alan DeNiro’s answer to Question #3) and was a little bit crushed that it’s a pseudonym. That has nothing to do with Alan, but something I wanted to confess nonetheless. Alan is the author of two poetry chapbooks, one short story collection, and the novel Total [...]

Nicole Johns received an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a BA in English from Penn State University-Erie. Her eating disorder developed in high school and worsened in college. The summer after starting the MFA program, Nicole went into treatment for her eating disorder. Purge is about the time she spent at an eating disorder facility after nine years [...]

I remember buying Norah Labiner’s debut novel, Our Sometime Sister, from the Discover Great Writer’s shelf at the Barnes & Noble back in 1998 and it blowing my mind. I had made a steady habit of choosing from that shelf and many, many of those selections still reside in my collection. Labiner has a new novel out, German for Travelers: [...]

Amy Abts joins MN Reads after being suckered into it by Christa (or something like that, I like to imagine it took some cajoling and lots of pretty please with sugar on tops). Amy’s worked at a bookstore for the past ten years and reads two to three books a week. She said she reads fiction and short stories are [...]

Yeah, I cannot deny that I’m pretty excited to have Jake Mohan writing for MN Reads. I first discovered Jake’s writing years ago on his personal blog The Dependent Clause. His writing is so good that I cyberstalked him at Reveille and Utne. But now, I won’t have to look too far to find his musing on literature. They’ll be [...]

Ben Kimball is a father of two who works full-time, recently graduated from Augsburg with a degree in Theology (I think), and will start Luther Seminary in the fall (which is next week, I guess). Yeah. Besides doing all that, he’s also made it his goal to read the 1001 books you must read before you die. You might call [...]

Kelly is a writer and a high school English teacher who is on her way to becoming a funeral director (I know!). Her short stories are quiet, controlled and very, very twisted (she once wrote about a woman who add cremains to a hotdish). Someday someone will be smart enough to publish one of them and you’ll see what I [...]