September 2021
Gravity of the Invisible: Absent Characters & the Physics of Fiction
Liam Callanan
“Gravity itself is invisible, but its effects are not. Bodies in space, on Earth, in literature, pull mightily and constantly. The evidence—the stories—are there, for all who refuse to refuse to see.”
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A Conversation with Mary Ruefle
Tina Cane
"Invisibility is also complicated; for a race or creed or any group worthy of equal representation, it is a nightmare. But for an individual, it can be liberating, not to be beholden by anything or to anything."
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A Coherent Shape to Brokenness: The 2021 AWP Conference & Bookfair Keynote Address
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Joy Harjo
“The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth’s peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and stories. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from, and who we are becoming.”
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The Power of Words: A Conversation with San Antonio Poet Laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson
Sheila Black
"Poet Laureate is a role of public service. Any poet laureate—whatever society you live in—needs to look at what the disparities are, what things are missing, how through literacy, literature, and storytelling, you can give that back, how to fill the void through observation, celebration, and concrete initiatives. I’m always looking to fill that void.”
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The Geography of Heaven: Al Young 1939–2021:
Alan Soldofsky
“The reality of Al Young as a poet, as well as a novelist and memoirist, is that he made it his life’s work to establish such a generous, unself-assuming virtuosity.”
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Craft Elements of Multilingual Poetry in America
Amanda Galvan Huynh
“When poets decides to bring in their native language or home language into a given poem, they still have to balance syllables, flow, sonic qualities, and imagery for the audience. ”
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What If? The Art of Speculation in Creative Nonfiction
Ana Maria Spagna
“In poetry, and increasingly in lyric essays, readers will gladly enter the mysterious in-between world of “what
if,” especially when the world is imbued with unrestrained passion.”
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An Interview with Essayist Patrick Madden
Anne McGrath
“This genre grants me power, giving me authority over the truth, at least my truth, and
for some reason this scares me, maybe because my own truth seems murky even to me.”
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Suggested Teaching Guide for Gerry LaFemina’s “What Is This Thing: The Paragraph as Literary Nexus & an Argument for the Prose Poem”
Michelle Y. Burke
“What do we do with the notion of the prose poem, something by its name that lives in the netherworld between these major genres? It is inherently sui generis, an amphibian, a Frankenstein monster.”
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