staff reading list

Sep 12

Written By Holly Mason

Back to School!

The So to Speak editorial staff put together a list of reading recommendations for you…

Editor Melanie Tague Recommends:

The Opposite of Light by Kimberly Grey

No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

Assistant Editor Kristen Brida Recommends:

How the End Begins by Cynthia Cruz

If the Tabloids are True, What are You? by Matthea Harvey

Blog Editor Holly Mason Recommends:

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong

Assistant Blog Editor Madeleine Wattenberg Recommends:

Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón

Change Me: Tales of Sexual Transformation from Ovid Translations by Jane Alison

Poetry Editor Danielle Badra Recommends:

Sand Opera by Philip Metres

The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay

Assistant Poetry Editor Ela Thompson Recommends:

Queen of the Fall by Sonja Livingston

Fiction Editor Bianca Spinosa Recommends:

Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Assistant Fiction Editor Amanda Bender Recommends:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman

Nonfiction Editor Meg Sipos Recommends:

The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison

Assistant Nonfiction Editor Liesel Hamilton Recommends:

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination by Barbara Hurd

Holly Mason

Holly Mason Badra is a queer, Kurdish American writer living in Northern Virginia. She is the curatorial editor of Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora (The University of Arkansas Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Mizna, The Markaz Review, Everything is Political, Poet Lore, Manoa, Rowayat, Meridian, Asymptote, The Arkansas International, The Northern Virginia Review, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, SWWIM Everyday, Circumference Magazine, CALYX, and elsewhere. She is the associate director of Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. She reads for Poetry Daily and serves as the board vice-president of Henar Press.