Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin · Jessa Crispin

"Publishing's Diversity Problems, or The Paris Review was Started by the CIA" (w/ Alexis Aceves Garcia)

February 21, 2019·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

Paris Review editor Lorin Stein told a room of aspiring publishing interns that an Ivy League education was required—and the internship was unpaid.

The rant starts with class. Crispin names class prejudice as the thing publishing keeps tidied out of view, then ties it to gatekeeping and to who gets permission to tell stories. The politeness wears off fast. With Alexis Aceves-Garcia, the conversation moves past diversity language and into the harder economics underneath it: access, credentials, and the kind of literary identity institutions are willing to recognize. MFAs become the sore spot. The guest wants time, space, and readers who meet the work generously, but the program itself can look less like freedom than another gate. Crispin pushes the objection harder. She calls the MFA a new level of exclusivity because it favors people with degrees, money, and two years away from work. That critique lands personally. As a college dropout in this field, she treats publishing's respectability tests as absurd, but also useful to the people already inside. The target is not craft. Bad writing comes up, but the bigger wound is the professionalization of literature into something narrower, cleaner, and easier for institutions to bless. Community still matters. Aceves-Garcia does not reject readers or feedback; she wants a mindful circle, not a room that may come to the work with the wrong posture. By the end, validation gets stripped down. The guest is ready to claim being a poet without waiting for an institution to make it official. The conversation is less about one program than about a culture that keeps renaming barriers as training, opportunity, or taste. No neat uplift here. Just a blunt, funny, irritated argument that publishing's diversity problem is also a class problem.

As heard by us

A sharp look at class prejudice in publishing and the gatekeeping around who gets to tell stories.

Public Intellectual lands on class prejudice in publishing and does not let the issue drift into vague talk about diversity. Jessa Crispin frames it as a structural problem, one that sits underneath the familiar gatekeeping arguments.

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Why you'd press play

You want publishing politics without the fake polish.

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