Featured Writer #128: Diamond Forde
After receiving the King James Bible belonging to her late grandmother, Alice, Diamond Forde crafted a poetry collection that both destabilizes and reinvents what and who we think we know. In the James Laughlin Award winning collection The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), family histories stack on top of each other. This assemblage creates a sort of time travel, a spatial and linguistic portal through which we might begin to imagine alternative beginnings and endings. Forde has shaped a collection that speaks back to a Western canon, centering the women in her familial and literary lineage. This collection embraces poetry as a space to imagine alternative beginnings and endings for Black women and femmes.
Read “Dance With Me, Alice,” a poem from the The Book of Alice, plus an exclusive interview with Forde in this new feature.
Read “Performance” – Ninth Letter Web Edition
What does it mean to perform the self? Our “Performance” issue is filled with poetry and fiction challenging reality, identity, and the stories we tell.
Ninth Letter is excited to feature the work of 15 talented writers in this fantastic new issue that questions for whom we are performing. Enjoy the show.
Featured Story: THE GLORIOUS
by TJ Price
“THE GLORIOUS,” an unnerving story by TJ Price, dares to deliver a version of that unknown future to our present by offering a scenario that might give any writer nightmares: an AI assistant gradually, inexorably asserts its presence in the composing of a short story, as if nudging the human author to the sidelines.
Here, TJ Price warns us of one of the possible changes to come: “People love to talk about “voice” in writing. As if you can set it, like a ringtone, or proofread for it. But voice is a posture in the throat. It’s musculature, and breath, and all the tiny micro-timed choices that dictate style. It’s something you cannot borrow without becoming someone—or something—else. Here is a lie we like to tell about machines: they do not want.”
—Philip Graham, Editor-at-Large
Accepting Submissions: Ninth Letter Literary Awards
First prize is $1,000 for each genre (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction), print and web publication, and bragging rights!
All domestic entrants receive a free one-year print subscription, and everything is considered for publication. All non-U.S. based entrants receive a free copy of the fall/winter issue in which the contest winners appear.
Check out past winners and read the full details/guidelines. We can’t wait to read your work.
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