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Header image: Cover of Snapshots, edited by Dinah Lenney, which shows ten square black-and-white photos arranged in a grid with spaces between them

Bloomsbury Academic
168 pages
February 6, 2025

If pictures are worth a thousand words, what kinds of words might they inspire? What stories would they tell and would they be joyful or sad, elegant or savage?

Snapshots features 36 such meditations from a diverse group of writers, each of whom draws on a photograph from their personal archive to inspire a short essay.

Intimate and powerful, these reflections exhibit a range of sensibilities and experiences, offering unique insight into the lives and interests of both established and emerging authors. Expressing a dynamic array of styles, relationships, landscapes, and preoccupations, Snapshots is an album for our life and times.

The book includes pieces from the writers below:

- Emilie Pascale Beck - Suzanne Berne - Aimee Bender - Sven Birkerts - Kate Carroll De Gutes - Stuart Dybek - Alex Espinoza - Lynell George - Amy Gerstler - Tod Goldberg - Hannah Howard - Vanessa Hua - Pico Iyer - Wayne Koestenbaum - Major Jackson - Leslie Jamison - Dinah Lenney - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich - Aimee Liu - Sonja Livingston - Attica Locke - Dinty W. Moore - Mara Naselli - Naomi Shihab Nye - Ivy Pochoda - Adriana E. Ramirez - Sejal Shah - Brandon Shimoda - Jessica Silvester - Aisha Sabatini Sloan - Susan Straight - Grace Talusan - Abigail Thomas - Clifford Thompson - David L. Ulin - Diana Wagman

Dinah Lenney has served as core faculty for the Bennington Writing Seminars and in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. A longtime nonfiction editor at LARB, she herself has published several books in the genre, including Coffee (as part of the Bloomsbury Object Lessons series), The Object Parade and Bigger than Life, and co-edited Brief Encounters: A Collection of Literary Nonfiction with the late Judith Kitchen. Dinah's essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among many other publications.

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.


February 2025


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An Excerpt from Holler

Denali Sai Nalamalapu

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