Bianca Stone sitting on a creaky floor with a very good, sensitive mic, talking with the poets Emily Brandt & Julia Guez about constructing their first books of poetry, published in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Rambling about poems to the lull of traffic.
Emily Brandt is a Brooklyn-based poet of Sicilian, Polish & Ukrainian descent. She’s a co-founding editor of No, Dear, organizer of the LINEAGE series at Wendy’s Subway, member of the collective Temp. Files, visionary at landscape.fm, and instructional coach at The Boerum Hill School for International Studies. She earned a BA in Psychology, Women’s Studies, and English from Boston University, an MEd from Pace University, and an MFA in Poetry from New York University, where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop. She’s been in residence at Saltonstall and Elsewhere, and an Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House. Since she was 13, she has worked in some capacity in reverse chronological order here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. She’s a Leo hitched to a triple Pisces.
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. Her essays, interviews, fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Guernica, POETRY, The Guardian, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail and Kenyon Review. Four Way Books released her first full-length collection,In An Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also A Frame, in 2019. After Hours Editions will soon release her first collection of poetry in translation, Equestrian Monumentsby the Costa Rican poet, Luis Chaves, co-translated with Samantha Zighelboim. Guez has been awarded the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship and The John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize in Translation. She holds degrees from Rice and Columbia. For the last decade, Guez has worked with Teach For America New York; she’s currently the senior managing director of design and implementation. She teaches creative writing at NYU and Rutgers.
