The Anthologist

In 2013, Colleen Kinder started asking writers “about the strangers lurking in the back rooms of memory,” the chance encounters and passing acquaintances that nonetheless shaped the trajectory of their lives. Now, in Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us (Algonquin Books, October 2021), edited by Kinder, more than sixty writers—including Lauren Groff, Pam Houston, Vanessa Hua, and Michelle Tea—reflect on serendipity and “the cast of characters who are randomly assembled in our path, dissolving quicker than we can spin around and ask, ‘What was your na—?’”

Since its earliest days, Farrar, Straus and Giroux has distinguished itself as an extraordinary publisher of poetry, championing writers such as John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop. On the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, the press celebrates this tradition and looks to the future with The FSG Poetry Anthology (November 2021). Edited by Robyn Creswell and Jonathan Galassi, this volume collects work by close to 125 poets, both legendary and contemporary, to give readers a singular snapshot of the evolution of poetry.

In her introduction to Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness (University of Florida Press, November 2021), editor Anjanette Delgado describes uprootedness as “a constellation in which you can find each immigrant, like a star, closer to or farther from home, occupying its own dot on the spectrum of belonging.” In poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, writers such as Jennine Capó Crucet and Jaquira Díaz consider the ways they’ve navigated this constellation, finding by turns displacement and connection, alienation and belonging.