Alex Kudera’s award-winning novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. Auggie’s Revenge (Beating Windward Press) is his second novel. His numerous short stories include “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Bombing from Above” (Heavy Feather Review), and “A Thanksgiving” (Eclectica Magazine).
"[Saul] Bellow went on to say something I like to propose to folks put off by political poems: 'I could write a better book from Lolita's point of view.' (Oh, if only Bellow had written that book!) Write a poem from [the Black tennis star's] point of view. Write a poem, write a novel in the voice of Mark Twain's Jim. Or in the voice of one of Charles Bukowski's girlfriends."
~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes
"My coming-of-age story begins unheroically with me on a college bunk reading [Etheridge Knight's] 'The Idea of Ancestry' in a literature textbook.' It may be that poets coming of age staring across space as the speaker does in that poem. I read the poet's biography: a black man from Mississippi, a prisoner who became a poet. I didn't know anything then about 'constructed speakers' in poems; I believed the 'I' of the poem was Etheridge Knight. I recognized him."
~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes
"I went outside, sat on the steps, and fired up a Marlboro from the pack I'd bought from the machine near the front door. I was through for the day. I'd had my fill of defeat. But the late spring afternoon was sublime. I watched two sleek ravens on the asphalt a few feet away as they tore apart the flattened carcass of a dead squirrel. The thoroughfares were glutted with cars and trucks and buses going who knows where. It came to me at that moment that one day I'd have to skip town myself. Where I'd go. I didn't know, but it would have to be far away. It wasn't working out for me in this outhouse of a city, and my gut told me it never would."
