Yes, I very much wanted to talk about Frank’s Place. But, the thing is, you don’t really interview Tim Reid. You just kinda sit back, hold on, and let the self-described “Black Forrest Gump” take you on an incredible journey. We talked about a lot of things (most of which couldn’t possibly fit in the interview below). We talked art and politics. Culture and technology. We talked Emmett Till, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Peter O’Toole. Irving Stone. Bob Barker. Maya Angelou. The Harlem Renaissance. The Italian Renaissance. And, yes, ultimately, we did talk about Frank’s Place. But when we first sat down, what Tim Reid wanted to talk about was Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo.

During the 1987-88 television season, CBS ran a show called Frank’s Place, a sitcom about a Creole restaurant in New Orleans. You’ve probably never heard of it. It was one of the first sitcoms shot in the single-camera, no laugh track, no fourth wall, dramedy style that is largely standard viewing today. The almost entirely Black cast portrayed nuanced, dynamic human beings, curiously revolutionary for the late 80s. Critics found the show smart and funny, and the ratings were solid. A second season was days away from filming when CBS suddenly cancelled Frank’s Place. 

The playful, soapy tone serves as a vehicle for serious questions: what, after all, is the nature of divine revelation?

aboutaleb fearlessly asks, Is it possible for grief and rage to build towards justice? Can grief and rage unmake empires? 

Like the best absurdists, Farkas creates worlds that are self-contained and somehow familiar despite their strangeness.

This is the mode in which McGhee works best: the horror that emerges from love, the violence that is inseparable from tenderness.

The surprising juxtaposition of skin and reading unifies the poem and situates speaker, subject, and landscape in a compassionate tableau. 

Living, Together is an anthology about communal living and community building that was inspired by my experience unexpectedly moving back in with my parents in my late 20s. I was surprised that I loved living with my parents so much—I stayed for six years!

It took me about twenty-eight pages of Mahreen Sohail’s collection Small Scale Sinners to decide I was changing my fiction syllabus to center this book. Okay, it took me exactly twenty-eight pages.

“Maybe I’m desperate for the ordered universe implied by these mythologies? Maybe I just love big, bad, shoot-em-up endings? Or, maybe they’re really just the same thing?”

Ojeda explores abstract ideas and interiority through her characters, creating not a sequence of events that build into a plot per se, but a series of interlocking ideas.

Light offers a playbook of lives burnished by sorrow and sweetened by fondness, which reminds us that caregiving begins before birth and continues beyond death.

The state of Florida occupies a contradictory cultural space—it is at once an idea and a physical place, a right-wing politic and a swamp.

I knew I was going to love Eric C. Wat when I read his website bio and he described writing “for queer folks whose main concern in life isn’t coming out”—which is a nice way of describing what I would call queer people who are not flattened to that one singular drama in the weird vacuum of (white) (middle class) (pop-fic) queer lit. That is, Wat writes for and about people with immigrant families, difficult or precarious jobs, illnesses and/or addictions, and all the stuff of real life.

We emailed with our friend Hannah Grieco about her session Writing Wrestling Live, coming to the Barrelhouse conference at American University in DC on April 18, 2026.

It was just about the easiest and fastest conference proposal in the history of our long-running Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing. A Dolly Parton Poetry Workshop? At the conference hosted by the literary magazine that literally has a love of pop culture written into our DNA? Yes, please, as soon as possible! We emailed with the person who sent us that proposal and will be leading “Take Me Back: A Dolly Parton Poetry Workshop” at our upcoming conference on April 18 in DC, about the workshop what makes Dolly a particularly rich text, and what other pop icons might lend themselves to poetic pursuits.

So begins Larsen’s lyrical inquiry and examination of the private miracle, the private sacrament, and the private devotion that comes from an erasure of the self.

How does a writer, or anyone really, cope in a world filled with waiting rooms, part-time jobs at trendy health stores, and expertly coordinated medical malpractice?

It’s the type of collection that makes a reader want to wander out in the street, burbling with the fever of discovery, desperate to tell anyone what he has felt.

Matthews’s deftness of language, cleanness of form, and laser-focused intent presents the reader with a collection of prayers in the guise of poems.