Repair—A Virtual Celebration of Literature

April 1, 2022

Boston Review welcomed celebrated writers Meredith Talusan (Fairest, one of O magazine’s Best LGBTQ Books 2020) and Brian Teare (Doomestead Days, winner of the 2019 Four Quartets Prize) for a night of readings to celebrate the release of our new literary anthology, Repair. Moderated by arts editor Adam McGee and contributing arts editor Ivelisse Rodriguez, the evening also featured Boston Review 2021 contest winners Adebe DeRango-Adem, Simone Person, and Yiru Zhang.

We bear deep wounds, individually and collectively. All have been worsened by a period of destructive politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, we believe that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal.

In this new anthology of poetry, fiction, memoir, comics, and essays from renowned writers and newcomers, contributors explore whether and how we can repair from terrible ruptures.

Yiru Zhang, born in Nanjing, China, is a finalist for the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction and a recipient of the Literary Journal's New Criticism Award. She has works published or forthcoming in Reed Magazine, the Florida Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Gordon Square Review, and other venues. She is currently working on a collection of short stories threading boundaries, brokenness, and intimacy.

Meredith Talusan is the author of the memoir Fairest, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and has written for the New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic, LitHub, Guernica, Catapult, and many other publications. Meredith has also contributed to several books, most recently the fiction collection Anonymous Sex. Meredith lives in Baryville, New York and teaches in the MFA programs at Antioch College and Sarah Lawrence College.

Simone Person is a Black queer femme born and raised in the Midwest. They are a two-time Pink Door Writing Retreat fellow and the managing editor of just femme & dandy, as well as the communications leader and a company member at Queer Cat Productions. Their debut prose chapbook, Dislocate, won Honeysuckle Press’ 2017 Chapbook Contest, and their debut poetry chapbook, Smoke Girl, won Diode Editions’ 2018 Chapbook Contest.

Adebe DeRango-Adem is a writer and former attendee of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University), where she mentored with poets Anne Waldman and Amiri Baraka. She is the author of Vox Humana; Ex Nihilo, a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Terra Incognita, nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award; and The Unmooring. A poem from The Unmooring was featured in the 2019 Poem-In-Your-Pocket anthology, co-created by the League of Canadian Poets and the Academy of American Poets. Adebe served as the 2019–20 Barbara Smith Writer-in-Residence with Twelve Literary Arts (Cleveland, Ohio) and was selected by Sonia Sanchez as the winner of the 2021 Boston Review Annual Poetry Contest. She lives in Toronto.

Brian Teare, a 2020 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of six critically acclaimed books, most recently Companion Grasses, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize. His honors include the Birittingham Prize and Lambda Literay and Publishing Triangle Awards, as well as fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now Associate Professor at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Ivelisse Rodriguez is a contributing arts editor at Boston Review. She is the author of Love War Stories, and a finalist for the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award and the 2018 Foreword Reviews Indies Award.

Adam McGee was managing editor of Boston Review from 2015 to 2022 and Arts in Society editor from 2019 to 2022. His writing and poetry have also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Electric Lit, and Cimarron Review.

Repair—A Virtual Celebration of Literature

Donate to support work like this:

The Reality Drive

Art Thieves

The Machines Get in the Way

Get our newsletter