The Writer's Notebook
Articles on publishing, teaching, career advice, current literary affairs, and more. In short, a blog about everything in your notebook.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Mitchell S. Jackson
AWP | February 2019
I’ve thankfully received a handful of grants in the last few years. They give me the money to live, pay a bill, travel, keep my accounts from running anemic, but they also provide the encouragement to continue scribbling away. And that encouragement is invaluable.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Sandra Gail Lambert
AWP | February 2019
It's the squealing that happens when you turn a corner and right there is a friend you haven't seen since that last residency, conference, or reading.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Jericho Brown
AWP | February 2019
I remember going to a panel with Toi Derricotte, Kay Murphy, and Alicia Ostriker back when I was getting my MFA. I was so happy to just lay eyes on and marvel at the genius of Ostriker. And I remember that their three talks left me with the feeling that I could indeed allow everything I have and know into my own poems.
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Unbinding Our Eyes: Poetry as a Way of Seeing
Nausheen Eusuf | February 2019
Poetry and vision have a long association—both in the sense of seeing the world intensely, and in the sense of sight that is visionary rather than ordinary.
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Teaching Critical Literary Citizenship
Robert McGill and André Babyn | February 2019
Some kinds of participation in literary citizenship are more valuable than others. Not considering carefully how one’s acts of literary citizenship might, for instance, serve corporate interests or rehearse exclusionary social practices could have harmful consequences.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Karen Russell
AWP | February 2019
I was so thrilled to give the keynote at AWP in 2015. It was a surreal and wonderful experience.
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What the World is Trying to Be: Lessons from John Goulet
Mauricio Kilwein Guevara | February 2019
Of the many things that John helped to clarify for me over the thirty years of our friendship is that literature at its best animates the core social functions of bringing humans closer to one another, of mitigating unwelcome solitude, and of growing our empathy for the world at large.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Joy Ladin
AWP | February 2019
The author I would most want to meet is Emily Dickinson, whom I have studied, read, and taught for decades.
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African-American History Month: Board Member Picks
David Haynes | February 2019
This month I’m celebrating books about vibrant black communities. Here are three terrific titles about coming of age and being nurtured by the village around you.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Paul Guest
AWP | February 2019
As great as the conference is, I’ve always been energized and refreshed—inspired—by those around me.
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Who Was I to Write? Persisting Through Doubt, Bias, and Parenthood
Olga Livshin | January 2019
It took me thirty-five years to stop doubting my English, a little over a year to write my first book, and just six months to get it accepted for publication.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
AWP | January 2019
I have my own large study where I write and the landscape here has really affected where my writing has taken me for my next book.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Max Wolf Valerio
AWP | January 2019
I wandered into a panel on crime writing—true crime, noir, hardboiled—and was overjoyed to hear swearing, blunt and forceful speech, no-nonsense direct language, and a generally intense, even inflamed atmosphere.... It occurred to me that possibly I had missed a calling. I am interested in exploring this type of writing at some point and seeing where it leads me.
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Ten Ways to Take Advantage of Your AWP Membership in the New Year
Megan Eden Kuyatt | January 2019
I’ve been an AWP member for years, but it’s only after working for AWP that I’ve begun to realize just how many resources we have for writers.
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Switching Genres
Ariel S. Winter | January 2019
Getting a book published isn’t a matter of selling the book to one excited editor. It is selling a book to that editor who then needs to go to a meeting to sell that book to the rest of the editorial team, the marketing team, and the sales team.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Victoria Chang
AWP | January 2019
I fall in love with words, not stars.
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How I Won My First Artist Grant
Sarah Dalton | January 2019
I knew that even if I didn’t get the grant, I’d learned a lot from Lyzette, Rosenberg’s book, and Alex about how to make my application provoke enthusiasm from the grant committee.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Martín Espada
AWP | January 2019
Boston, 2013: I gave a reading at a benefit for Split This Rock. A good friend of mine made a stunning entrance. The Hynes Convention Center will never be the same.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Rebecca Makkai
AWP | January 2019
I've always wondered how F. Scott Fitzgerald would hold up at the hotel bar.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Adrian Matejka
AWP | January 2019
This is such a bountiful time for literature and poetry especially, so I’ll share a few new poetry collections I hope will get a little more attention.
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#AWP19 Featured Presenter Q&A with Marilyn Chin
AWP | January 2019
My work would not have flourished without public funding—it’s the lifeblood of poetry.
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