Literary Citizen is where literature and politics meet.
Literary Citizen gives literature a place to speak directly into current events. Novels and stories and poetry have the unique capacity to transcend the echo chambers in which we find ourselves, to provide a different kind of insight. There will be recommendations, but this isn’t just a reading list. We’re looking to books for illumination, connection, feeling. Motivation. Fortitude. A sense of the bigness and smallness of things. Answers insofar as there are any. Occasionally, we’ll talk with readers about books and writers about how they see their work speaking into the world. Literary Citizen is edited by Emily Shetler.
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About Angela
I’m a writer, editor, erstwhile politico and new mom. I grew up in Wichita. My mother comes from Czech and Danish immigrants and my father, who served as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, was Mexican-American, born in San Antonio.
When I was 19 I came to Washington to intern in Congress. Everything I knew about politics I learned from a volume of The Babysitters Club when Kristy runs for class president. (Turns out her job, homework and chores became overwhelming and she had to drop out of the race, so maybe I learned more than I thought.) D.C. stuck, and for the next 15 years I worked for progressive public policies. I lobbied for affordable housing, launched a national campaign to help America’s struggling renters, and was chief of staff at a multi-billion-dollar nonprofit.
In 2016, I quit. I quit not because I had given up on the work; the work persists. I quit because I believe in the persuasive power of fiction. I began to write, mostly a novel, but also this newsletter. My writing has been supported by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I earned an MFA in fiction. I’m a proud Macondista and assistant fiction editor at The Rumpus.
About Emily
I am a writer living in the Pacific Northwest. I started work as an editor at print magazines and websites years ago. Many don’t exist anymore. Later, during an early midlife crisis, I began to write fiction. I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to receive an MFA in creative writing and MA in journalism, and while there I also learned how to draw comics. I am at work on a novel and essay collection.
