What changes you as a writer: OHIO’s Spring Literary Festival showcases writers’ evolution of genre

Lily Hoàng

Hoàng is the author of six books, including Underneath (winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award), A Bestiary (PEN/USA Non-Fiction Award finalist and winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's Non-Fiction Book Prize), and Changing (recipient of a PEN/Open Books Award). With Joshua Marie Wilkinson, she edited the anthology The Force of What's Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. And with Blake Butler, she edited 30 under 30: an anthology of innovative fiction by young writers. She is the Director of the MFA in Writing at UC San Diego, where she teaches in Literary Arts.

Her 2021 novel, “Underneath” (Red Hen Press), takes a more realist approach in comparison to her previous work. Red Hen Press writes, “unlike other fictionalized true-crime novels, [‘Underneath’] neither valorizes nor focuses on the specific acts of violence. Instead, it attempts to understand how feelings of powerlessness, the residue of trauma, and the need to find justice in a world that refuses to give a fat body justice finds its only respite through murder.”

Describing her own process in a New York State Writers Institute interview, Hoàng says, “‘Underneath’ has changed me as a writer. The most obvious way is the amount of time I spent on it.” The book took her almost a decade to write. She continues, “With ‘Underneath,’ I learned rejection. This novel must’ve been rejected by 30, maybe 40, presses. I learned patience. And I learned how to radically revise. This book taught me terror—I’ve never been afraid of my own characters before—and it gave me humility.”

“A Bestiary” is Hoàng’s first collection of essays (2016). In it, she takes an experimental approach, writing in several genres. “With chapters that are organized around the signs of the Chinese zodiac, Hoàng explores themes of family, belonging, loss, and female subjugation. Hoàng dives into personal territory, such as the death of her sister, the distant and abusive relationships she herself has endured, and her doubts and reflections about the path her own life has taken” (“The Rumpus”). Fairytales are woven into her storytelling with juxtapositions that invoke the meaning and power behind her work, “such as a story of a man hunting the elusive white tiger that took his father from him.”

In an interview with Cleveland State University Hoàng says, “I understand the world through fairy tales. I often say that I spend 50 percent of my life toiling and 50 percent of my life marveling. My ability to marvel is also my devotion to the marvelous, to the fairy tale.”

Cross-genre luminary Maggie Nelson reviewed “A Bestiary” with high praise; “Rarely have I come across tenderness, venom, and fire held so intimately, so exquisitely... This book would be impressive enough as a collection of finely-forged fragments, but as it weaves itself into an even more impressive whole, my hat came off.” 

Of her own work, Hoàng says, “In the first draft of ‘A Bestiary,’ all the essays were lyric and long… But as I revised, each essay started to look different. I guess I figured out how to transfer all my ‘fiction’ skills to the existing rubric of the ‘nonfiction essay’ to elasticize both forms. Bestiaries contain both real and imagined creatures; my bestiary contains both real and imagined forms. I remain inside genre by disrupting everything else around it.”

On process, she writes, “We are always influenced by the books we read; that information is always stored somewhere. While writing, though, I tend only to read philosophy and cultural theory, mostly for research but also mostly for pleasure…any aesthetic influence [is] something that had lodged itself—logged itself—as potential. And during the writing process, these potentials are held akin to a hand full of tarot cards—or divinatory I Ching sticks (as modeled in “Changing”)—the most correct form shows itself and returns to me: a revelation.”

Hoàng has been a Mellon Fellow at Rhodes University in South Africa, a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Cornell College, and a Cultural Exchange Faculty Fellow at Wuhan University in China. To date, she has taught creative writing on five continents. She serves as an Editor for Jaded Ibis Press. Other work of Hoàng’s includes her first book, "Parabola," (winner of Chiasmus Press Un-Doing the Novel Contest) and "The Evolutionary Revolution" (Les Figues Press, 2009-10).

She has two books forthcoming in 2024—"The Mute Kids” and “A Knock at the Door,” and her collaborative collection, “Timber & Lụa with Vi Khi Nao,” is forthcoming in 2025.

Mary Szybist

Szybist has received several of the nation’s most prestigious fellowships, including those of the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. Similarly, her work has appeared in competitive publications, including Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Tin House, and two Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Originally from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Szybist earned a BA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Portland, Ore., where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

Her first book, “Granted,” won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Praised for its delicacy and aphorisms, the poems spin among simultaneous expressions of intensity, tenderness, and the many threads of desire we move among. Often quiet, but also often radical in its takes, Granted pushes against several false binaries in our literary culture. The coinciding of spirit and flesh, of what is of the air and what is of the body, fascinate Szybist in her first book and continue to feature in her second. Moments of seriousness and humor exist in the same poem, as they do in the most important events in our lives.

Szybist is most recently the author of “Incarnadine,” which won the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. With a dominant preoccupation with the Annunciation, Szybist explores in this second book that undeterminable, mysterious moment of the Angel coming to the Virgin Mary. Over and over across the book’s poems, with fresh images and lenses, Szybist considers that moment and explodes it to new territories. What did the Annunciation mean, for example, to the ground beneath Mary? To the air in the next room? What does the Annunciation mean to a right whale? Not a poet to shy away from intense topics, Szybist’s other poems in the collection contemplate loss, crimes committed by individuals and systems of power, and the compassion required of all of us in response.

About “Incarnadine,” the National Book Award Committee wrote, “This is a religious book for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary doubts for the faithful.”

Chigozie Obioma

Chigozie Obioma is the author of two Booker Prize shortlisted novels. His most recent novel, “An Orchestra of Minorities,” was published in 2019 by Little Brown and Company and is described as a “contemporary twist on Homer’s Odyssey” which, by combining “Igbo folklore and Greek tragedy in the context of modern Nigeria” creates “a rich, enchanting experience.”

An Orchestra of Minorities,” is told through the centuries-old voice of a guardian spirit. This emotional epic explores the depths of the human experience as Obioma weaves together realism and magic, and shines a spotlight on one’s desire to return home after the cruelty of the world takes you far from it.

Obioma’s novel has been translated into 20 languages and was a finalist for both the Booker Prize 2019 and the Digital Book World Awards 2019. The novel was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and appeared on Publisher’s Weekly'sTIME’s, and BBC's Best of the Year lists.

Obioma is one of only two writers whose complete works have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, with “The Fisherman,” 2015. His third novel, "The Road to the Country," will be published in June with Penguin Random House.