Many of us love a great questionnaire. They slow our scroll on Instagram, if we’re honest. And how many times have you flipped to the back of frieze to read how an artist or curator answered those iconic questions: “What should change?” Or, “What was your first great art experience?”

In this tradition, we’ve created our own questionnaire for a project we call the Rabkin Interviews. We invite the winners of the Rabkin Prize to answer a series of questions we’ve developed to understand more about their lives and ideas. One of the great pleasures of a format like this is we all get to participate, in a way, to consider how we might respond. It’s a conversation that accumulates over time. Or at least that’s the idea.

We pair our audio interviews with a still portrait of these writers in the spaces where they work created by artist-photographer Kevin J. Miyazaki. A point of inspiration for the portraits was Jill Krementz’ 1996 book “The Writer’s Desk.” We know the writing life looks very different today and want to investigate that. 

Our primary goal is to humanize the often invisible labors of today’s arts writers. We will populate this page with new interviews, about once a week, starting in the middle of September and until early November.

Subscribe to the Rabkin Interviews on Substack or find it on the usual podcasting platforms.