February Spotlight: Letters in the Mail

Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs. We’ve got one program for adults and another for kids ages 6-12. Next month, subscribers will be receiving letters from Matthew Salesses and Anuradha Bhowmik, and Eleanor Glewwe and Lee Edward Födi, respectively.

Anuradha Bhowmik is a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey. She is the 2021 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first collection Brown Girl Chromatography, published by Pitt Poetry Series. Bhowmik is a Kundiman Fellow and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Project Winner in Poetry. Her poetry and prose have appeared in POETRY, The Sun, Quarterly West, Nashville Review, Indiana Review, The Offing, Bayou Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Zone 3, The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She can be found at anuradhabhowmik.com. Anaradha writes to us about seeking happiness in an unhappy world.

Matthew Salesses is the author of four novels, most recently The Sense of Wonder, and a book about writing and teaching writing, Craft in the Real World. He writes to us poignantly about feeling love after loss.

Eleanor Glewwe was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Minnesota. She plays the cello and once braved a snowstorm to perform in a chamber music competition. At Swarthmore College, she studied linguistics, French, and Chinese and worked in the music library, shelving composers’ biographies and binding scores with a needle and thread. She is the author of the middle grade fantasy novel Sparkers and its companion Wildings, both from Viking Children’s Books. In addition to being a writer, Eleanor is a folk dancer and a shape note singer. She now lives in Iowa, where she teaches linguistics at Grinnell College. Eleanor’s letter is all about musical instruments!

Lee Edward Födi is an author, illustrator, and specialized arts educator—or, as he likes to think of himself, a daydreaming expert. His books include Spell Sweeper, The Secret of Zoone and The Guardians of Zoone. During his free time, he’s a traveler, adventurer, and maker of dragon eggs. He especially love to visit exotic places where he can lose himself (sometimes literally!) in tombs, mazes, castles, and crypts. He lives in Vancouver with his wife and son. Lee Edward Födi writes to us about how growing up on a farm helped him become a writer.

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