An interview with faculty member A. Van Jordan appears online at storySouth:

This spring, prior to publication of his new chapbook, The Homesteader (Unicorn Press 2013), I emailed back and forth with A. Van Jordan. In preparation for the interview I read both Jordan’s new collection, and two of his previous collections Quantum Lyrics and MACNOLIA. What I enjoy most in Jordan’s work is how he stitches a collection together narratively and historically. There is a real sensitivity in his work to constructing character in ways that connect. He makes people and their stories feel real, and relatable. I asked several craft questions related to his recently released work about the life and times of Oscar Micheaux and we ended up having an interesting discussion about the emotional center of creative work.

A. VAN JORDAN is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award (Tia Chucha Press, 2001); M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, (2005), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by The London Times; Quantum Lyrics, (2007); and The Cineaste, (2013), W.W. Norton & Co. His chapbook, The Homesteader, was released by Unicorn Press in 2013. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a United States Artists Williams Fellowship. He is a Professor in the Dept. of English at the University of Michigan, and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

JP: There is no trace of autobiography that I can find in your new collection, The Homesteader, yet I felt the urge to look between the lines to see a correlation between yourself and Micheaux as artists. Did you feel a kinship to Micheaux, or was this purely a project where you wanted to put the personal aside to let history and biography take center stage?

AVJ: To answer your initial question, I think everything I write has a trace of biography—an emotional bio, if nothing else—in it. Read more