Eliot Khalil Wilson talks about poetry as a moral act, shopping for images while traveling, and why he’d be happy to be sung to by a frog. more »

Anna Lena Phillips reviews Gabriel Thompson's Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do, a new book of nonfiction about how immigrants earn their way in the U.S. more »

Paul Buhle adapted Studs Terkel’s oral history masterpiece, Working, into a comic book. He talks to Fringe’s Alexandra Sheckler about what working means to individuals and how comics reveal the lives of ordinary people in a way that prose can’t. more »

Addonizio talks about how a poet is like a musician, being inspired by “Little Orphan Annie,” overcoming fear of failure, and what it takes to be a working poet. more »

Poet Cheryl Dumesnil talks about why her children are her gurus, San Francisco as a font of poetry, and how she knows when a poem is ready to publish. more »

Jessa Crispin, founder and editor of Bookslut, on her erudite litblog, the publishing industry, and the best reads of 2009. more »

Author, essayist and journalist D.T. Max on Raymond Carver, his distrust of adverbs, and why he was destined to become a writer. more »

Fringe editor-in-chief Lizzie Stark interviews Kelly McMasters, whose first nonfiction book, Welcome to Shirley came out last year. more »

When the New York Times released its list of the best 25 American novels of the last 25 years, the list that contained only two women, one of whom was the only writer of color on the list, we felt angry. So we compiled this alternative list. more »

Didn’t see your favorite novel on the New York Times Best Books list? We didn’t either. more »

This list, created by the editors, editorial assistants, readers and staff of Fringe, and compiled by Ellen Mahoney (with help from Katie Spencer and Sarah Dowden), represents a nowhere-near-complete list of our favorite feminists, old and new. more »

You have to love the Guerrilla Girls for “fighting discrimination with facts, humor, and fake fur” as their website states. This anonymous collective of women artists don gorilla masks to criticize Hollywood, the art world, and others for their bad behavior, and in doing so, they explode stereotypes of beauty and the idea that feminists are humorless. They’ve authored three books, produced bitingly funny posters and billboards, and engaged in guerrilla sticker campaigns at Sundance, the... more »

The other day, I was walking by the university and I saw two beautiful 20 year old girls crossing the street and felt envious for a moment. Then I thought: Oh wait, they think they’re fat. They’re walking around thinking about what’s wrong with them. Maybe they weren’t, but there are plenty of girls who are and it’s a long, slow subtraction of happiness. more »