Combined Poetics and Compromising: A Conversation with Brittany Cavallaro and Jeff Zentner

Brittany Cavallaro is the New York Times bestselling author of the Charlotte Holmes novels, including A Study in Charlotte, and the historical fantasy duology Muse (HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books). With Emily Henry, she is the author of Hello Girls (HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen Books). Most recently, she wrote the young adult verse novel Sunrise Nights with Jeff Zentner (HarperCollins/Quill Tree).

Cavallaro is also the author of the poetry collections Girl-King and Unhistorical, both from University of Akron Press. A recipient of a National Endowment in the Arts fellowship, she received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her PhD in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where she lives with her husband, cats, and golden retriever.

Jeff Zentner is the author of The Serpent King, which Kirkus Reviews named one of the best books of the 21st Century, as well as In the Wild Light, Goodbye Days, Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, Colton Gentry’s Third Act, and Sunrise Nights, coauthored with Brittany Cavallaro. Among other honors, he has won the ALA’s William C. Morris Award, the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award twice, the Muriel Becker Award, the International Literacy Association Award, been longlisted twice for the Carnegie Medal, and is a two-time Southern Book Prize finalist. His books have been translated into fifteen languages and been featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and in Vanity Fair and People Magazine. Before becoming a writer, he was a musician who recorded with Iggy Pop, Nick Cave, and Debbie Harry. He lives in Nashville.

On November 13, 2025, The Interlochen Review editors Quinn De Vecchi, Iliana Demas, Charlie Lombardo, and Andi Erickson met with Brittany and Jeff to discuss their collaborative work on the verse novel Sunrise Nights.

Quinn De Vecchi: Could you both talk about your experience working together on Sunrise Nights and why you chose to do a collaboration?

Brittany Cavallaro: Jeff and I have been friends as long as we’ve been publishing novels, more than ten years now. I love collaborating with friends—I’m the author of another co-authored novel, Hello Girls, with Emily Henry—and when I realized that Jeff loved poetry as much as I do, I kept thinking about the possibilities of us doing a narrative novel-in-verse together.

Jeff Zentner: Before I came to novel writing, I was in bands, and there’s a real magic to collaborating with someone you admire on a piece of art. You produce something that neither of you would have (or could have) produced solo.

This collaboration came about after I was picking Bri’s brain a lot in the writing of In the Wild Light, which has a prominent poetry component. Bri was the model for the poetry instructor in the book. She helped me shape the poems that appear in the book and I got to come to Interlochen to observe one of her classes⏤an intimidating experience. Interlochen kids are very smart! Anyway, after this, she approached me about cowriting a verse novel. Which was good because I would have never presumed to approach her about it. She’s a real, published, respected poet and I’m a hobbyist and poetry lover.

Iliana Demas: How was the book-writing process different as a partnership? What aspects of writing individually do you prefer?

BC: The best thing about co-writing is that, in the end, you only write half a book. It’s the writer’s dream, more or less, to open your manuscript and find new pages in it, oftentimes better pages than you yourself could have written. That said, I think you absolutely need to trust the person you’re writing with and respect their own work to make a good collaboration happen. I think it’s also important to come up with your project together, rather than inviting another writer into a project you’ve devised and are internally claiming as ‘yours’. Jeff and I have true joint custody of Sunrise Nights, as well as the new project we’ve written together. It’s ours.

JZ: There’s not a long list of things I prefer about writing solo to cowriting. I almost said, half-jokingly, that it’s nice to get paid twice as much when you’re writing solo, but as Bri points out, you’re not getting paid twice as much because you’re doing twice the work. I guess the nicest thing about writing solo is I’m only disappointing myself if I really flub something I’m not dragging anyone down with me. Otherwise, writing with someone I trust and respect as much as Bri is really a dream. I love that we end up with a book that has emotional colors that just aren’t part of my palette. I love that the plot goes in directions I would never think to take it. The way Bri and I write, we each end up “turning over the keys” to each other’s characters for the other to write, and it’s pretty magical to see someone else writing a character you formulated in your head and to write a character your partner formulated in her head. And it keeps me sharp and on my game. I never feel like I can phone something in when Bri is going to be writing the next passage after what I’ve written.

Charlie Lombardo: During your time writing together, did you have any difficulties with merging different creative visions? How did you go about solving those problems?

JZ: Not at all. I genuinely wish I had some amazing, Fleetwood Mac-esque story of artistic friction to share, but I think we went about it the right way to avoid that. We came up with an idea together at the outset that we both could pour our hearts into. We had at least a general sense of where the story would take us. And we approached it without ego, committed to enjoying the process of collaboration as its own creative animal. We both have our solo work in which to be uncompromising (to the extent going through 19 editorial passes with your editor counts as such), so when it came to this, we didn’t butt heads on vision.

ID: How did you decide to write Sunrise Nights partially in prose and partially in verse? How did you organize as you went about this?

BC: Originally, we conceived of this project as a true novel-in-verse, charting the interior lives of Florence and Jude as they met and re-met and re-met over their high school summers. But Jeff and I both love writing banter, and I think we only got four or five pages into this manuscript before we were commiserating over how much we missed dialogue. These novels are shamelessly inspired by Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, especially Before Sunrise (our title’s allusion!), and one of the things we love most about those film is that stretching sense of endless possibility, the idea that, in talking to this new person, whole worlds are opening up around you. This exterior—conversation—was the thing that ended up driving dramatic monologues for Jude and Florence that we were writing in verse.

Ultimately, we created our own form out of utility, and trusted that readers will follow along. It was a little nerve-wracking putting the book out on submission, and we were really happy with the response we got from editors.

Andi Erickson: What role do the subsections play in allowing the reader to access the character beyond the poetry? Did you find they lent themselves towards description in a similar fashion to fiction, especially since much of the other characterization is done through dialogue?

JZ: In creative writing, you’re always taught to “show; don’t tell.” And the reason for this is that telling can be so much more inert on the page than showing and you don’t want inertness. You want your pages to crackle with life and energy. But telling lets you convey information in such an economical way. Poetry splits the difference. Poetry is interesting and beautiful to read and you can use it to tell things in a fairly straightforward way while avoiding inertness. Poetry is also a great way to convey emotional truth and interior monologue of characters, since so much poetry is essentially that, but the character is the real-life poet.

AE: Italics are one the main cues to how your characters speak and think. For example, “... like God why are you so needy,/Florence, then smiled your vanity smile…” (pg 235). These cues were so intertwined with the piece and integral to how we read the characters. I was wondering what it was like to write this many voices, each with their own style?

BC: There’s a lot of different ways that people talk to each other in this book! Usually, it’s Florence and Jude (and occasionally Ravyn) speaking in the prose sections, but when Florence or Jude dips back into memory, they’re oftentimes calling up a specific moment, or something someone’s said. And oftentimes it’s a paraphrase, or a quote out of context, or something our narrator has misunderstood—like all memories, they’re fallible. What’s spoken and left unspoken are the questions in Sunrise Nights that our characters are obsessed with.

In terms of the occasional italic emphasis, in dialogue or in poetry, it’s mostly me, I think! Florence is a very emphatic character. She wants to stomp hard on certain words, and though I mostly use linebreaks to accomplish that feeling, sometimes a word just needs to be said hard.

ID: How did you both prepare to write extended persona poems? What are some tips for stepping into a character’s voice? Did you find it difficult to switch out of Florence or Jude “mood”?

JZ: I know only one way to write a novel⏤whether solo or as a collaboration⏤and that’s to allow my characters residency in my brain, where I’m engaged in a pretty constant dialogue with them. I like to say that I could never sit down across from any real person and presume to tell them their life story. But I could sit across from them and listen and write as they tell me theirs.

So my preparation for writing an extended persona poem involves a lot of listening to the voices residing in my head. And I would ask Bri questions about her conversations with Florence. What’s Florence’s favorite food? Would she be flattered to be compared to Stevie Nicks? Would she be willing to eat a cricket donut? Etc. etc. I never found it very difficult to switch out of Florence or Jude mood because I was sort of always in Florence/Jude mood. I didn’t switch.

AE: How do you think the sections in this book change its pacing? Over the course of the three days this book encapsulates, we get hints at time and placement and these markers slow down time. What is your relationship to time, and how do you see it show up in this text?

BC: This book is a coming of age story, and charting the way Florence and Jude change over the course of high school was integral to understanding their relationship to their art and to each other. We knew we wanted to focus on these three pivotal nights and let them stretch on, endlessly, the way perfect nights do. It’s also a tribute to the way times moves when you’re a teenager, long and fluid and emotional. The ‘desert’ sections, where Jude and Florence are catching us up on what’s happened since they’ve last seen each other, work as both a highlight and a low-light reel, and tee us up for the conversation Jude and Florence are about to have.

QD: Bri, as a past student and teacher at Interlochen, could you talk about how Interlochen affected your writing and Sunrise Nights? And Jeff, did you have any previous experiences with camps that inspired you to make Sunrise Nights?

BC: It’s funny, I knew when I was writing this book that I would be inviting a lot of comparisons to Interlochen—the name of the camp they’re attending is Harbor Arts, and it’s set in northern Michigan. But I’ve actually never attempted Interlochen’s core camp or taught in it. What I know of camp life is from a wonderful nerd camp I attended when I was a teenager, in Chicago, which had its own ‘sunrise night’ that kicked off with a bonfire.

That said, my Interlochen students inspire me every day, as cliche as it sounds. I love working with them, love knowing what’s on their minds and what they’re obsessed with, and I love working with them on their own poetry and prose.

JZ: I know the absolutely luminous magic of the summer arts camp. As a kid, I did a summer youth theatre camp, which was just the highlight of my year. So many sweaty backstage makeout sessions, almost missing cues. As an adult, I volunteered as a music instructor and instrument tech at Tennessee Teen Rock Camp and Southern Girls Rock Camp. Getting to see kids at these camps from an adult perspective was no less magical, and it’s actually the reason I became a writer. It made me want to make art for teenagers and writing seemed like a more accessible way of doing so than making music, which was my main creative outlet. So I switched up and here I am now.

CL: Could you walk us through the timeline of publishing for Sunrise Nights? And for the editing process, would you say it was easier or more difficult to complete that as part of a collaboration?

JZ: Sunrise Nights took us around nine months to write, by my recollection, before we were ready to seek a publisher. The hunt for a publisher got off to a somewhat rocky start. Both Bri’s and my publishing imprints passed on the book. So our agents took it out on the market and fortunately it got a lot of interest there. It ended up going to auction with five publishing houses. The auction happened while I was riding the train to Edinburgh, Scotland in June 2022 for Bri’s wedding and it closed while Bri was still in her wedding dress. It was the perfect way to sell a summer romance.

QD: Could both of you talk about future projects? And are you considering collaborating again?

BC: We have a new novel in verse in conversation, Wayfarers, that’s coming out in summer 2026! We had a blast working together again and are excited for it to be out in the world. I also recently finished work on my third collection of poems, Lossless. Currently, I’m at work on a mystery novel for adults.

JZ: Echoing Bri’s excitement for Wayfarers. Secretly, I thought it was too much to hope for that the lightning in a bottle we felt like we captured writing Sunrise Nights could be replicated, but we did with Wayfarers. It was a blast.

In addition to Wayfarers, I have my second novel for adults publishing in 2026. It’s called Love, Like Apples and follows Tiller Loomis from his difficult upbringing in 1960s East Tennessee as he discovers a love for puppetry and eventually gets hired on a bold, groundbreaking PBS show for teenagers called Imagine Nation, in 1970s New York City. I’ve always been obsessed with that time and place in history and it was exciting to finally be able to set a story there.