The Place of Literature: A Roundtable Discussion

In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. 

As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name.

The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now?

In this live episode, Jennifer Sahn leads a conversation with Sindya Bhanoo, Michael Croley, Donovan Hohn, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho about the role of literature in a new era of political division. Sahn is the editor-in-chief of High Country News, a magazine about the American West. She previously served as executive editor of Pacific Standard and as editor of Orion before that. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards, Utne Independent Press Awards, Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Prize, John Burroughs Essay Awards, and the Best American Series anthologies.

Sindya Bhanoo is the author of Seeking Fortune Elsewhere (Catapult), a story collection that won the Oregon Book Award, New American Voices Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and Sergio Troncosco Award, and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and The Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, and Glimmer Train. She is a recipient of an O. Henry Award, the Disquiet Literary Prize, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. A former reporter for the New York Times and the Washington Post, Sindya was a 2020 Knight-Wallace Fellow and has earned recognition from the Pulitzer Center and Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. 

Michael Croley is the author of Any Other Place: Stories, winner of the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His reporting, essays, and stories have appeared in Esquire, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Golfer’s Journal, Golf Digest, The Paris Review, and Switchyard. He teaches creative writing at Denison University.

Donovan Hohn is the author of The Inner Coast: Essays and Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book. His essays have appeared in Harper's, New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn spent several years editing essays, fiction, and literary journalism at Harper’s, has taught nonfiction in the MFA program of the University of Michigan, and is now Director of Creative Writing at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Antonio Ruiz-Camacho is the author of the short story collection Barefoot Dogs, winner of the Jesse H. Jones award from the Texas Institute of Letters. A National Magazine Award finalist, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, Electric Literature, and Switchyard.